Beyond Borders: A Re-visit to the Historical Negotiations, Cultural Conflicts and Hybridity of Regions across the World

Borders are not merely lines of enclosure; they serve as texts, connectors, and transmitters, whether physically or conceptually. They represent a fluid and dynamic phenomenon that challenges fixed notions of border fencing and interrogates nation-building projects predicated on territorial absolutism. These constructs often marginalize trans-border realities and crossings, creating multiple dichotomies within society, such as insider/outsider, local/foreigner, and immigration/migration, ‘being/non-being’ which influence contemporary discourses about citizenship and identity. This is particularly evident when examining borders as institutions, as discussed by Anssi Passi (1998). The demarcation of borders plays a crucial role in shaping spatial narratives about land, mind, and technology, with their multiple gestures and expressions embodied and encoded in and through various routes and links.
Paying attention to historical and conceptual realities emanating from crossing, blurring, mixing, bridging, sharing, and shifting boundaries, David Newman shifts our focus beyond the concept of ‘bordering’ and opens up new possibilities for reading and understanding nations, cultures, and communities. This shift enables us to think about places, communities and institutions beyond conventional nationalistic frameworks. Encouraging us to explore global communities through new archaeological findings that reveal historical and cultural layers, this approach challenges the rigid notions of boundary-setting in relation to history and culture.
All possibilities and realities of broader border-boundness emerge via cultural and historical negotiations which occur in various forms such as acculturation, fusion, assimilation and appropriation. As historical processes, these new interactions and crossings have generated cultural conflicts within and between communities through the years. They have also contributed to the creation of hybrid phenomena as observed in numerous historical and cultural expressions all over the world.
Homi Bhabha (1994), drawing on the context of colonialism, argues that hybridity is not merely a mixing of cultures but a process that creates new, ambivalent cultural forms. In a broader sense, a border represents a negotiated space and serves as a meeting and mixing point for regions with multiple layers. Recent studies in border studies, island studies, regional and area studies, international relations, geography, refuge studies, sociology, economics, language and literary studies, political science, history, culinary studies, art history, heritage and museum studies, philosophy, psychology and cultural studies, and fashion and popular culture provide ample material to understand this complex process.
This conference welcomes submissions of papers and presentations that concentrate on, but are not restricted to, the following sub-themes.z