Exploring the Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept.

The conceptual evolution of borders has been characterised by important changes in the last twenty years. After theprocessual shiftof the 1990s (from border tobordering), in recent years there has been increasing concern about the need to critically question the current state of the debate on the concept of borders. Within this framework, this article explores the critical potential of theborderscapesconcept for the development of alternative approaches to borders along three main axes of reflection that, though interrelated, can be analytically distinguished as:epistemological, ontologicalandmethodological. Such approaches show the significant potential of borderscapes for future advances of critical border studies in the era of globalisation and transnational flows, thereby contributing to the liberation of (geo)political imagination from the burden of the ‘territorialist imperative’ and to the understanding of new forms of belonging andbecomingthat are worth being investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]