Border | (De)Glossary of Migration Studies

by Federico Besserer June 2026

Borders have become one of the most significant concepts for understanding the contemporary world. In recent decades, and with renewed intensity in the present, they have occupied a central place in public debate and scholarly analysis. The Mexico–United States border, particularly the Tijuana–San Diego region, has been one of the most influential sites for theorizing borders, where intense daily mobility coexists with surveillance, restriction, and control. Other cases, such as the Mediterranean or militarized borders in different regions, have reinforced the idea of borders as key sites for understanding migration, sovereignty, and inequality.

The concept of border is not singular. It is commonly distinguished as borderline, referring to the territorial line between states; border zone, referring to the broader social and spatial area structured around crossings and circulation; and borderland, referring to lived territories where historical and social processes exceed the political line itself. In borderlands, the border may have moved while populations remain, producing overlapping histories, identities, and forms of belonging that challenge the idea of borders as fixed separations between pre-existing entities.

More recent discussions emphasize re-bordering, showing that borders are not static lines but mobile regimes of control. Border functions are increasingly displaced beyond territorial limits through airports, checkpoints, detention centers, humanitarian infrastructures, and security practices located far from the physical frontier. Borders, in this sense, are not only geographical demarcations but also technologies of governance. Importantly, these externalized borders are also spaces where force and violence are exercised: through detention, militarization, policing, and differentiated regimes of mobility. The movement of borders thus entails the movement of coercive infrastructures that regulate life, movement, and exposure to risk.

This reconfiguration complicates earlier understandings of globalization as simple intensification of flows. While transnational spaces persist through migration, remittances, and cross-border networks, borders increasingly function as filters that structure unequal mobility. Transnational life continues, but under conditions of selective restriction, producing forms of asymmetry between those who move freely and those whose movement is blocked or regulated.

A decentering of the concept reveals that there is no single center from which “border” can be understood. Rather, different empirical and theoretical configurations produce different analytical emphases. The Mexico–United States border has become a dominant reference point in border studies due to its intensity, visibility, and geopolitical significance. As a result, many key concepts—borderlands, hybridity, transnationality, and transborder life—have been shaped by this specific context, sometimes becoming generalized beyond the conditions that produced them.

However, other regions reveal different problematics. In parts of the Southern Cone of Latin America, where regional agreements facilitate circulation, borders are less defined by massive enforcement regimes and more by long histories of colonial formation, state building, and the production of difference. Here, borders are often analyzed as processes through which identities are territorialized, racialized, and institutionalized, rather than primarily as sites of contemporary border crisis or militarized mobility control.

Alongside academic discourse, vernacular uses of the concept reveal additional layers. At the Mexico–United States border, the frontier is commonly referred to as la línea, and crossing is described as cruzar la línea, emphasizing its material and infrastructural reality: walls, fences, checkpoints, surveillance systems, police, and military presence. In other Spanish-speaking contexts, however, vernacular references often evoke different materialities, such as rivers, bridges, towns, or historically shared landscapes, indicating that borders are not experienced or imagined in a uniform way.

Decentering the concept thus reveals that borders are not only differently theorized but differently lived and named. It exposes inequalities in which certain borders become paradigmatic while others remain marginal in theory, as well as tensions between mobility and control, colonial histories and contemporary regimes, and official representations and everyday practices. At the same time, it makes visible processes that are often obscured or overwritten, bringing into view social relations and historical trajectories that risk disappearing when a single border experience is universalized. These submerged realities are also sites from which alternative forms of connection, articulation, and collective action may emerge.