This two-part panel seeks to showcase new research on borderlands, stretching more than four centuries and four continents. We focus on the intersection of boundary-making and alternative geographies, understood here as the spaces of mobility, ecological zones, indigenous territories, and other places that counted something other than national and imperial notions of territory as their basis. This global borderlands section considers disparate histories that elucidate how people’s lived geographies and the materiality that undergirded them influenced and were shaped by processes of post-colonial state formation, international boundary disputes, and securitization and surveillance of borders. Specifically, it shows how people reacted to the imposition of colonial boundaries in Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea and how they built “popular geographies” that did not align with colonial ideas of space and sovereignty; how nonelite people in the Belizean borderlands shaped international negotiations between the United Kingdom and Guatemala during the twentieth century; how rebels and migrants shaped the processes of surveillance and border governance in the Argentine-Chilean Andes at a crucial moment of nation-state formation in the nineteenth century; and how “Palestine” was administered, represented, and ultimately imagined in the context of post-second-intifada Israeli infrastructural and legal tactics of surveillance and “securitization.”

The intended result is an open conversation on key questions in the field of borderlands. How have lived geographies shaped the contested, uneven, and always incomplete process of boundary making? What has been the place of materiality in the construction of borders and in the “embodied resistance” central to reclaiming space? How can borderlands show the place of nonelites in construction and maintenance of the international order? What do borderlands archives look like against the backdrop of the domination of imperial and national archives, and the perspectives they reinforce? How can borderlands histories disrupt temporal boundaries established by national and imperial historiographies? And ultimately, what are the usefulness and future directions of borderlands histories in an academic context in which they have become accepted and institutionalized? We aim to push forward a conceptualization of borderlands as constitutive of a new spatio-historical paradigm that has a different set of foundations than the state-centric ones that have dominated historical scholarship, providing in the process new understandings of the contemporary world order and the tenuous ground on which it stands.