This book examines the enduring significance of borders in Southern Africa, covering encounters between people, ideas and matter, and the new spatialities and transformations they generate in their historical, social, economic and cultural contexts.

Christopher Changwe Nshimbi is Director & DST-NRF RCA Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation (GovInn) at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Inocent Moyo is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Zululand, South Africa.

Jussi P. Laine is an Associate Professor of Multidisciplinary Border Studies at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland.

1. Borders as sites of encounter and contestation 2. Sociocultural encounters in geography historicised 3. Grassroots actors, border interactions and regional integration in the Southern African region and SADC 4. Resilience nodes: grassroots-state encounter and interactions in COMESA-EAC-SADC tripartite free trade area border spaces 5. From circumvention to overt resistance at the urban margins: protests against statutory regulations at South Africa-Zimbabwe border 6. Sustaining family ties across the border: unaccompanied child migration across the Botswana-Zimbabwe and South Africa-Zimbabwe borders 7. Long march to South Africa: the breaking of colonial borders through human smuggling of Congolese 8. The securitization of asylum in South Africa: a catalyst for human/physical insecurity 9. Implications of the micro processes of encounter contest in borders