News
"Qu'est-ce qu'une frontière aujourd'hui ?"
April 2015
"Today, the importance of borders in people’s lives is more than theoretical. Borders unite and divide they have become mobile and individualized, letting some move around freely and restricting access to others."
"Hence, whether they are opening or closing, borders have become an object of public policy as well as an essential resource for private interests they are both a governing tool and an advantageous one for the market economy. They represent a point of political, social, economic exacerbation, a laboratory of our times. For the moment, international borders remain the basis of citizenship, on which democracy is built… But the manner in which they oscillate reveals the uncertain future of our political systems. To understand what a border constitutes today means raising fundamental questions in order to visualize our future societies, as well as redefining our relation to the world."
A geographer, Anne-Laure AMILHAT SZARY is a professor at the University of Grenoble-Alpes. Member of the IUF, her research focuses on territorial dynamics. She directs a research group entitled ‘Borders, alterity, peripheries, globalization’.
Presses Universitaires de France. 164 pages, 14€, March 2015, in French – More info.
