This book offers fresh insights into the complex and various ways in which international frontiers influence cultural identities. Ten anthropological case studies describe specific international borders in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America, and bring out the importance of boundary politics, and the diverse forms that it may take. As a contribution to the wider theoretical debates about nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization, it will interest students and scholars in anthropology, political science, international studies and modern history.

1. Nation, state and identity at international borders; 2. State formation and national identity in the Catalan borderland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; 3. A western perspective on an eastern intepretation of where north meets south: Pyrenean borderland cultures; 4. The 'new immigration' and the transformation of the European/Africa frontier; 5. Transnationalism in California and Mexico at the end of empire; 6. National identity on the frontier: Palestinians in the Israeli educational system; 7. 'Grenzregime': the Wall and its aftermath; 8. Transcending the state? Gender and borderline constructions of citizenship in Zimbabwe; 9. Borders, boundaries, tradition and state on the Malaysian periphery; 10. Markets, morality and modernity in north-east Turkey; 11. Imagining 'the south': hybridity, heterotropies and Arabesk on the Turkish Syrian border.