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Border areas have been and remain present in public discourse because of growing concern around the spaces they entail for the transfer of humans and goods. Taking this as a starting point, this paper discusses some analytical frameworks related to the notion of borders in order to locate the current discussion. On the one hand, it shows the tendency to associate borders with a limit marking the sovereignty of states and determining who is inside and who is outside. On the other, the focus on the national ignores the daily life unfolding in the border areas, whose constitution also demarcates conflict spaces. Using the Tarapacá border (Chile) as a case study, the analysis concludes that the functioning of the border acts as a heterogeneous architecture. It is also observed how it has changed in materiality and operates as a multilocal exclusion/inclusion mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking Spain as a case study, this paper analyses the institutional production of border apparatus within reception countries, which affect very diverse areas of the daily life of migrants. Hence, rather than as a rigid line dividing the population into included and excluded, the border is approached as a flexible governance mechanism that differentially regulates access to rights. Starting by analysing the formal and informal operation of some of the institutions that manage the process (immigration offices, social services and the healthcare system), an attempt is made to give an account of the norms, requirements, administrative procedures and infra-penal mechanisms that especially affect vulnerable groups, stratifying the recognition of rights and condemning subjects to a legal limbo in which their legitimacy is - at best - blurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]