This book examines how the relationship between borders and the movement of people within and towards the European Union (re)defines and challenges key political concepts such as sovereignty, territory, rights, and identity in the EU, particularly in a period marked by geopolitical shifts and heightened perceptions of vulnerability. Organised into thematic sections, this edited volume is structured around three main themes: Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the reintroduction and persistence of internal border controls within the Union, and the Pact on Migration and Asylum. Drawing on diverse disciplinary perspectives, some chapters explore the EU’s unresolved tension between internal and external borders in an era increasingly shaped by inward-looking tendencies among member states. Other chapters analyse the constitution and contestation of liminal borders amid the ongoing reconfiguration of relationships between the EU’s core and its peripheries. Additional contributions investigate emerging geographies and legal spaces associated with borders, challenging the fixed cartographies that the current geopolitical moment appears to reassert, and addressing both tangible and intangible borders. The final chapters offer broader reflections on the EU’s cognitive borders and the Union’s constitutive grammar of rights, democracy, and equality as affected by reactions to the movement of people. Thanks to the wide range of perspectives it brings together, this book will be of interest to scholars in International Relations, European studies, migration studies, and border studies.

Michela Ceccorulli is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna, Italy.