and economic landscapes and localized, popular
interpretations.
Boundaries are present in national iconogra-
phies (flags, coats of arms, statues), commemo-
rations, military parades, literature, songs and
folklore, graffiti, sites of battles and landscapes
that all signify and symbolize national identity.
Border scholars should analyse how these ideas
have gained their importance in the constitution
of territorial entities and the spatial identities of
the people. Therefore researchers need to use
critically many kinds of materials: media dis-
courses (TV, movies, newspapers), manifesta-
tions of ‘high’ and popular culture, educational
materials, etc. One important theme for bound-
ary studies is the analysis of the contextual forms
of national socialization (Paasi, 1996; Radcliffe
and Westwood, 1996). This theme includes
a critical political geography of boundary
maintaining institutions: the military-industrial
complex, religion, education, racism, foreign and
security policies, for instance. All are crucial
elements in the construction of geographies of
inclusion and exclusion.
Security has been closely linked in national
narratives with national political identities that
are represented as depending on the construction
of boundaries with the other. In a rapidly trans-
forming world of foreign policy, the elites of
states try to redefine territoriality, foreign/security
policy and identity – often in the form of new
images of threat. Therefore, researchers have to
pay attention to analysing how the legitimation
of boundaries and the production of their social
and cultural meanings take place.
Boundaries are with us not least because they
are part of social identities and the making of
territory and place (Massey et al., 1999). Their
contextual functions and meanings imply that we
cannot writethem away, as some globalization
theorists seem to suggest. Boundaries, identities
and difference construct the ‘space of agency’,
the mode of participation in which we act as
citizens in the complicated polities to which we
belong (Yuval-Davis, 1997). This does not mean
that the identities of people or places are pure
and fixed. Identity is the result of myriad inter-
actions that occur ‘inside’ (and with the outside)
of a space whose boundaries are not clearly
defined (Mouffe, 1994). This means that bound-
aries do not have any universal essence and do
not represent permanent ‘truths’, but are social
constructs, results of struggles and power rela-
tions. The boundary is, therefore, a space for
struggle and a zone of negotiation and reflection
(Massey, 1995). Researchers are therefore forced
to reflect on the paradoxes, contradictions andcontrasts that are hidden in the practices and
narratives of boundaries, identities and exclu-
sions. It is important to analyse who constructs
the hegemonic practices and narratives on
boundaries, on ‘us’ and others, and why, how
and in which institutional practices these narra-
tives are (re-)produced. Border scholars need to
reflect upon the structural and ideological con-
stituents of boundary formation while they also
have to be sensitive to the ethnographies of daily
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