Introduction: Border Temporalities in and Beyond Europe

How are borders and time related? Are borders shifting state lines enshrined in history, the landscape, and cultural heritage? Are borders places where new understandings of time and space can be formed? Are temporalities of borders the material appearance, transformation, and disappearance of borders or the social practices which leave us with traces of times, tidelines, phantom, or ghost borders? Have we paid enough attention to the experiences of people from different ages passing borders? This special section of Borders in Globalization Review presents twelve articles developed from papers presented on the conference on “Borders in Flux and Border Temporalities in and beyond Europe”, which was organised by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), the Transfrontier Euro-Institut Network (TEIN), and the Franco-German Jean Monnet Center of Excellence in cooperation with the UniGR-Center for Border Studies and Borders in Globalization (BIG) on 15 and 16 December 2022 in Belval, Luxembourg. The conference examined the temporal dimension of borders, borderlands, and border regions. The articles shed light on temporalities of borders by exploring the relationship between temporalities—in their broadest sense, understood as the way time is experienced and lived—on the one hand, and border practices, border discourses, and border regimes on the other. They focus on four approaches: the past, the present, the future and borders, diachronic studies of borders and border regions, age and borders, and new understandings of time and space at the border.
Keywords: borders; temporalities; border temporalities; Europe.