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A book review of the 2021 Harvard U Press book On the Edge: Life along the Russia–China Border, by Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey.

Special Poetry Section with a co-authored introduction and a collection featuring 39 poets from around the world.

This special issue of International Studies focuses on ‘how the British-exit is impacting the European Union’. This introduction is a review of the context, costs and institutional repercussions, as well as the very recent the UK/European Union trade deal and implications for customs borders. Eight articles then detail consequences for European Union policies and important trading relationships: Immigration, Citizenship, Gender, Northern Ireland, Trade and impacts on India, Canada and Japan.

This introduction outlines the themes of the special issue (borders, borderlands, and border theory since the onset of COVID-19 lockdowns) and summarizes its contents (a research article, two dozen essays, plus photography and videography). The introduction also includes an interactive map hyperlinking the contents of the issue, and raises new lines of thought for border studies in the era of COVID-19.

Several Canadian and international scholars offer commentaries on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for governments and public service institutions, and fruitful directions for public administration research and practice. This second suite of commentaries considers the challenges confronting governments as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the decades to come with an increasingly broad lens: the need to understand and rethink the architecture of the state given recent and future challenges awaiting governments; the need to rethink government-civil society relations and policies to deliver services for increasingly diverse citizens and communities; the need for new repertoires and sensibilities on the part of governments for recognizing, anticipating, and engaging on governance risks despite imperfect expert knowledge and public skepticism; how the COVID-19 crisis has caused us to reconceive international and sub-national borders where new "borders" are being drawn; and the need to anticipate a steady stream of crises similar to the COVID-19 pandemic arising from climate change and related challenges, and develop new national and international governance strategies for fostering population and community resilience.Plusieurs universitaires canadiens et internationaux ont offert des suggestions sur les implications de la pandémie du COVID‐19 pour les gouvernements et les institutions de la fonction publique, ainsi que des orientations futures pour la recherche et la pratique en administration publique. Cette deuxième série de commentaires examine les défis que devront affronter les gouvernements en raison de la pandémie de COVID‐19 et dans les décennies à venir, dans une optique large. Cette série souligne le besoin de comprendre et de repenser l'architecture de l'État, de revoir les relations entre le gouvernement et la société civile pour fournir des services à des citoyens et des communautés de plus en plus divers, d'élaborer de nouvelles façons d'identifier et d'anticiper les risques, et de s'engager malgré l'imperfection des connaissances d'experts et le scepticisme du public, de repenser les frontières, tout ceci en tenant compte des crises et défis à venir, de façon à promouvoir la résilience de la population et des communautés.

This review essay explores the contributions of six recent volumes in border studies.

This special section (thanks to the Jean Monnet Network, a European Union Erasmus+ Grant) explores the impact of migration crises on European borders, internal and external, from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. The following articles adopt comparative, historical, legal, sociological, and discursive approaches in order to confront questions arising from the 2015 Schengen and Dublin political crises, which seem to have put an end to the ideal of a “Europe without borders”.

Cet article analyse la contribution de la contestation contre l’UE a une narration alternative de l’Europe. Se fondant sur des theories de l’euroscepticisme, l’article soutient que la contestation contre l’UE ne necessite pas d’etre basee sur un rejet fondamental de l’integration europeenne. En effet, elle peut faire une contribution constructive a une vision alternative de l’Europe en accentuant des valeurs comme la solidarite, la democratie, les droits humains ou la protection de l’environnement. L’analyse empirique soutient cet argument en demontrant comment la contestation de l’UE en Allemagne a evoque des images de « heros » et de « scelerats » d’une Europe alternative.

This article is a review of regional cross-border coordination and cooperation around the world. Two questions are raised: when trade dominates, does economic or functional interdependency result in cross-border linkages? Second, when politics and institutions mediate cross-border relations, do economic relations intensify? Specifically, do local–central networks of government actors and institutions mediate such processes when they emerge? To investigate those two questions, this work focuses on cross-border relations in various parts of the world primarily focusing of the role trading relations or local–central relations would play in developing cross-border networks spanning an international boundary. In an era of globalisation, increased trade across regions of the world seem to have led to a specific increased cross-border cooperation, however, taking different forms from intense trading relations to resulting cross-border institutionalisation. Those forms of cross-border cooperation in the various regions of the world, however, do not result from the same drivers: For the purpose of a comparative analysis of cross-border relations, the argument developed here is that regional drivers determine types of relations from no relations to intense trading and government-like forms of cooperation. However, in most cases as suggested below, the prime drivers of cross-border relations, trade, do not necessarily translate into increased border spanning governmental activism, and government cross-border institutionalisation does not necessarily transmute into increased economic integration.

Book review

A review of the 2017 edited volume, Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersection.

Why is it important to discuss the work of Michel Foucher on African borders in JBS in 2019/20? The brief answer is that in our globalizing world, faced with many nationalisms, the cultural borders...

In 2008 Iceland experienced the deepest and fastest economic crisis ever recorded in peacetime, which included the total collapse of its financial sector, as well as significant erosion of its currency. This paper concerns a localized protest movement that occurred in the wake of the 2008 crash in Iceland: the mobilization of protest to a settlement deal, known as the Icesave settlement. We interviewed just over 30 actors involved in the mobilization, including politicians, activists, and academics. Our data show that both sides of the Icesave dispute drew on a set of three interwoven narratives, or framings of the debate, that respectively drew on ideas around natural justice, citizenship, and nationalism. Several key discursive intersections between these narratives and the political and economic landscape in the post-economic crisis not only rendered the Icesave dispute salient and commensurate with the experiences of Icelanders living through the crash, but also gave greater credibility to the no-Icesave campaign. We conclude by arguing that the Icesave dispute provides a unique lens onto central questions concerning democracy and the possibilities of meaningful citizen engagement and participation in an era of increasing globalization and of neo-liberal forms of economic governance. Our findings contribute to this literature by revealing some of the particularities of the Icelandic context that were important in creating the socio-historical moment that led to the success of the anti-Icesave movement.

A brief letter of introduction from the editors.

International audience

International audience

International audience; History of cape Doumeira and the boundary between Djibouti and Eritrea. How it impacted local situations and was managed, from the end of the 19th Century up to the 2008 conflict, by the varying countries in charge (Italy, France, United Kingdom, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Eritrea).

International audience; The Swiss Jura / Berne border dispute is linked to the discordance between the political border of the Swiss Bern and Jura Cantons, and the linguistic border between French and German speaking populations. From 1815, Bern Canton has had a large French speaking population. The French speakers gained the right to create their own new Canton called ‘Canton of Jura’ following a 1974 referendum. But the border between Bern and JuraCantons is still contested. On November 24th, 2013, a second referendum over selfdetermination has occurred making is clear that 71.8% of Berne Canton residents do not want to join in but for a primarily francophone city, Moutier, where 55.4% want to move over to the Canton of Jura.

International audience