Geographers have not traditionally paid much attention to the meanings of boundaries in the construction, organization and reproduction of social life, identities, territoriality and power, but rather have understood boundaries as forming categories of their own and then classified them on diverging grounds. The state-centred system of territories and boundaries largely defines how we understand and represent the world and how knowledge of the geography of the world is produced, organized and used in the reproduction of the nation-state system. This maintains that all individuals should belong to a nation and have a national identity and state citizenship and that the bordered state sovereignties are the fulfillment of a historical destiny. This view has become pivotal in defining not only our world-views but also human identities.

National identity is only one of many, often coexisting and overlapping identities (religious, tribal, linguistic, class, gender, etc.) but it is perhaps the most fundamental in the modern world. Greenfeld and Chirot argue that this identity actually defines the very essence of the individual, which the other identities only slightly modify. States are in a decisive role in the production and reproduction these manifestations of territoriality, particularly through spatial socialization and territorialization of meaning, which occur in many ways through education, politics, administration and governance. This territorialization takes place through physical and symbolic violence, and states everywhere attempt to control, marginalize or destroy various aspects of centrifugal otherness, such as instances of ethnic solidarity or indigenous movements.

Many contemporary discourses have began to challenge the state-centred conceptual narratives during the last decade or so – and to provide new ones in their place. The strongest challenges have emerged from overlapping discourses on postmodern aesthetics, style and culture, the epoch - particularly the socio-economic condition of postmodernity, with its emerging ‘flow’ rhetoric - and, finally, a postmodern (or rather post-structuralist) understanding of the constructed and contested nature of identities, knowledge and ‘truth’. In particular, dissident IR theorists and critical geopoliticians, often drawing on post-structuralist argumentation, have aimed at rendering ‘theoretically visible’ the constituents of the territorial trap - the traditional assumptions of state territoriality and fixed images of the bordered world of nation-states and identities. As Shapiro writes, "The assumption that bordered state sovereignties are the fulfillment of a historical destiny rather than a particular, and in some quarters controversial, form of political containment has been challenged". An increasingly critical attitude exists towards the state and boundaries as categories that are taken for granted, and this can also be seen in a new interest in boundary literature, which seems to be emerging on the basis of both theoretical motives and concrete border cases.

The second challenge for border studies has been more practically based, often emerging from the context of post-Cold War Europe and from concrete efforts to expand various forms of cross-border cooperation. This is linked with a broader context, i.e. the processes of globalization. It is now increasingly being argued that the processes of globalization will give rise to new global geographies and increase all manner of links (cultural, political, economic, informational) across boundaries. This will detract from the role of state boundaries and sovereignty and lead to the de-territorialization and re-territorialization of the territorial system. Boundaries (and nation-states) are comprehended as fading dimensions in socio-spatial transformation rather than fixed physical lines.

Researchers in many fields are engaged today in evaluating the changing roles of state, identities, sovereignty and boundaries, and in extreme cases their disappearance. Much of this discourse is linked with ideas of globalization, but scholars are not unanimous about this phenomenon and its effects on global-local relations and on boundaries. In any case, the new rhetoric reflects changing global links, and boundaries are increasingly being understood as symbols of a past, fixed world that will be replaced by a more dynamic one. Accordingly, this process will reduce the roles of the sovereignty and identities of states and therefore also challenge national identities and boundaries. Ohmae, for instance, declares that "in terms of real flows of economic activity, nation states have already lost their role as meaningful units of participation in the global economy of today’s borderless world".

Many authors point out that the state will still be the major context in which we organize our lives in the future, and it is crucial to note that territorial states are now simply operating in a new, global context. Hirst and Thompson in particular remind us that despite the rhetoric of globalization, the bulk of the world’s population live in closed worlds and are "trapped by the lottery of their birth". They maintain that states remain sovereign, not in the sense that they are all-powerful or omnipotent within their territories, but rather because they police the boundaries of these territories.

This paper will continue from the arguments set forth by Hirst and Thompson and by Anderson. Its argument will be that the debates on globalization, de-territorialization and re-territorialization have raised serious questions for border scholars, but the idea of a boundary has been understood rather vaguely in these debates. Instead of repeating much used arguments showing how nation-states and boundaries are disappearing, the aim of this paper is to scrutinize recent theoretical discourses presented in social and cultural studies and on this basis to suggest some new perspectives for boundary studies. The current confusion on the roles of boundaries is easier to understand if we consider the roles of boundaries as institutions and symbols. This helps us to realize the increasingly complicated meanings of boundaries and the fact that the same symbolizing element may have variegated meanings for different people in different contexts. It is obvious that the arguments provided by the extreme globalization theoreticians have also reflected the traditional meanings of boundaries, interpreting them as fixed, absolute, almost material entities. Nevertheless, one of the major challenges is to note the fact that boundaries are contextual phenomena and can vary from alienated to co-existent, or from interdependent borderlands to integrated ones, to employ the concepts of Martinez. This variation may be seen even in the case of single boundaries when they are analysed in a historical perspective.

Boundaries are institutions, but they exist simultaneously on various spatial scales in a myriad of practices and discourses included in culture, politics, economics, administration or education. If some of these practices and discourses, e.g. in the fields of economics, foreign policy or identity, happen to change, this does not inevitably mean the disappearance of boundaries. It is portentous to note that the meanings of sovereignty and territoriality are also perpetually changing, implying that territoriality is not just a static, unchanging form of behaviour for a state.

We will look here at three challenging themes which seem to be arising in the field of contemporary boundary studies, and will develop an approach that identifies boundaries as complicated social processes and discourses rather than fixed lines. Firstly we will discuss the discursive construction of boundaries and the role of narratives in this process. This is linked with the relation between boundaries and identity, the second theme. Thirdly, we will consider the links between boundaries and power.

Even though this paper is mainly theoretical and conceptual in its aims, each of these perspectives will be illustrated by using concrete examples. These examples concern the Finnish-Russian border area, but they also draw on broader contexts, particularly the EU, to shape the contemporary meanings of this area. The Finnish-Russian border is a good example of various forms of de-territorialization that have occurred since the collapse of the rigid East-West dichotomy, and also shows that it is essential to consider the multidimensionality of borders and approach them contextually. A longer historical perspective, beginning from the period when Finland was an autonomous state within the Russian Empire (1809-1917) before gaining its independence in 1917, shows the importance of understanding boundaries contextually. During the autonomy period the border was very much an open one and there was a great deal of cultural and economic cross-border interaction. Using the categories of Martinez, this may perhaps be labelled as an interdependent borderland. When Finland gained its independence the territorial strategy of the state changed radically: the border became an ideological one, a much used example in textbooks of political geography, and there was a minimal amount of interaction across the border – it was a typical alienated borderland. Furthermore, the border itself became a decisive symbol in the Finnish national identity, since it distinguished Finland from the Soviet Union, typically represented as the Other, the Evil One. After World War II Finland had to cede more than 12 percent of its territory to the Soviet Union and the border became a very strictly guarded line. Finland’s position in western geopolitical images also changed, so that where it had been classified in the western bloc before World War II, it was represented in textbooks of political geography after the war as an eastern European state. This was very much based on the changes in the country's international geopolitical position that followed from the pacts that it was forced to enter into with the Soviet Union. The Finnish state adopted a very cautious foreign policy, and all cross-border trade was organized very formally at the state level.

After the demise of the Soviet Union this strictly closed boundary between a small, western capitalist state and the leading socialist state changed rapidly and became much more open to all kinds of flows. It is still strictly guarded on both sides, however, illustrating coexisting territorial strategies that nation-states may practice. Finland’s entry into the European Union at the beginning of the 1995 has changed the meanings of this boundary still further, since it is now the only border between the EU and Russia. This fact has given it new functions and meanings that actually operate on spatial scales larger and smaller than the state. The former is accentuated by the forecasts of those Finnish social scientists who claim that during the next decade Europe will be a federal state and that the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is the first step in that direction. This would imply a very radical change in the territoriality of the state. On the other hand, concrete cross-border spatial planning and development projects are now occurring on a sub-state scale, which again ‘transcends’ the former territorial exclusiveness of the border.

Jean Gottmann pointed out that political and economic interests are combined in a complex way to form a trilogy of territory, population and governmental organization, and he reminded us at the same time of the power of symbolism, values, beliefs and ethics. This points to the point of departure selected for the present paper: that states continue to play a significant role in the popular politics of place-making and in the creation of naturalized links between places and people. The construction of the meanings of communities and their boundaries occurs through narratives: ‘stories’ that provide people with common experiences, history and memories and thereby bind these people together. Somers points out how social life is commonly ‘storied’. It is through narrativity that people come to know, understand and make sense of the social world, and it is through narratives that they constitute social identities. Somers and Gibson write that all people come to be what they are by locating themselves in social narratives, which are rarely of their own making. This is particularly the case with separate generations, which may differ a lot as far as their collective experiences are concerned. From the perspective of this paper it is narratives connected with the institutions of nation, state and territory that are of vital importance. These are typically linked with ontological narratives – stories that actors use to make sense of their lives as members of social collectives and to define who ‘we’ are. Boundaries between ‘us’ and 'others' are critical elements in establishing 'us' and excluding 'others'.

Boundaries are therefore one specific form of institution. The major function of institutions is perhaps to establish stable structures for human interaction and thus to reduce uncertainty and increase ontological security, but they can vary greatly in nature. As North points out, formal rules in a society may change rapidly as a consequence of political or judicial decisions, but informal constraints embedded in customs, traditions and codes of conduct are usually considerably more impervious to deliberate policies. All institutions are perpetually developing and being transformed, however, and the boundaries of territorial communities and the narratives constitutive of collective identities are also constantly changing.

Ashley remarks that the important question is not where a boundary is, but how, by what practices and in the face of what resistances this boundary was imposed and ritualized. This is a strong and somewhat ‘non-geographical’ argument. We should perhaps point out that while borders are in principle nothing more than lines drawn to demarcate the sovereignty of states, their location may be significant for the fortunes of states in the event of territorial disputes. This is the case also with the history and symbolic meanings of boundaries and how these manifest themselves in the territorial identities of the inhabitants of states and in the iconographies of states.

A boundary does not exist only in the border area, but it manifests itself in many institutions such as education, the media, novels, memorials, ceremonies and spectacles, etc. These are effective expressions of narratives linked with boundaries and border conflicts and serve as references to the Other. These mediums are also the essence of the institutionalization of the border symbolism and perform the key functions of symbolism, that is social control and communication. As far as nationalism is concerned, particularly challenging objects of research are the practices and discourses that territorialize memory and transform it as part of the civil religion. The latter is important in the spatial socialization process of the citizens and occurs most effectively in education.

Education in geography and history in particular typically produces and reproduces the iconography of boundaries, that is, the symbols that essentially construct the history and meanings of a territory. This iconography forms an entity that can be scrutinized using many types of concrete material, since boundaries exist in various practices and discourses: in politics, administration, economics, culture or the organisation of ethnic relations. These have both material and textual manifestations (newspapers, books, drawings, paintings, songs, poems, various memorials and monuments, etc.) which reveal and strengthen the material and symbolic elements of historical continuity in human consciousness. Particularly challenging objects of research are maps, which are often the results of deeply institutionalized practices of power and representation. Geography is therefore exploited in many senses in these boundary producing practices.

The construction of identity narratives is a contested political process and part of the distribution of social power in society. "Struggles over narrations are thus struggles over identity", write Somers and Gibson. The narrative constitution of identities points to the fact that language is a fundamental element in the nature of identity, where language is understood broadly as including other language-like systems which mean, represent or symbolise something ‘beyond themselves’. This is the case with most national symbols and the iconography that is used to communicate territoriality and boundaries. As Smith remarks, "the boundaries of nations and national states may be determined by military, economic and political factors, but their significance for their inhabitants derives from the joys and sufferings associated with a particular ethnoscape" , i.e. ethnic landscape. This has become obvious all over the world in places where various minorities have began to raise their voice and where the dominating majorities have aimed at keeping their control in the definition of the relations between physical and social spaces.

Boundary narratives have to be examined in connection with broader national and state narratives. In Finland, for instance, the border with Russia has been an indispensable part of many state narratives since the gaining of independence (e.g. national identity, or links with the West) and it also has a number of material and symbolic manifestations which differ radically from Finland’s other borders, with Sweden and Norway. Even though the Soviet collapse has radically altered the roles of the Finnish-Russian border and a total of 26 crossing points over the border have now been opened – six of them to international traffic - the border landscape still includes a strictly controlled frontier zone which can be entered only with special permission. This zone was established after World War II on the Finnish-Russian border, but no corresponding arrangement exists on the Swedish or Norwegian border. While as many as four million Finns and Russians per year cross the border nowadays and goods traffic is increasing, a similar, very effective border patrol system still exists as during the Soviet period and new, increasingly technical surveillance mechanisms are being introduced. New electronic monitoring systems have been installed which permit more effective governance and control of space. In spite of the increasing flows of people and goods, very much the same system of border signs still exists, including material and symbolic elements from watchtowers, customs houses and flags to barbed wire and uniforms.

All this means that the de-territorialization of the Finnish-Russian border has occurred in discrepant ways and in the context of different social practices. In some practices the border is still largely a closed one and territoriality as control over space is effectively enforced. Customs operations and control over migrants and refugees are very effective, i.e. although the flow of people has radically increased, control over who these people are has increased, too. On the other hand, numerous cross-border planning projects, partly established with the support of EU structural funds, indicate that the formerly almost totally closed border is relatively open in these areas of activity. The Finnish-Russian border is among the largest thresholds in the world as far as standards of living are concerned, and both of the these strategies aim at controlling and governing the situation in the border area.

The narratives attached to boundaries change perpetually along with developments in interterritorial socio-political relations and the internal relations within specific states. One challenge is to study the changing interpretations given to boundaries and how these express inter-state ideologies and links with the international geopolitical landscape. This approach is inevitably historical and non-essentialist: territoriality, boundaries and identities should not be understood as something primordial but rather situational and contextual. The Finnish-Russian border provides a fitting example of this contextuality. The meanings of the border have always been historically contingent and contextual, and these meanings have gained varied forms in social actions. While the border is still strictly controlled, the previous forms of territoriality have been changing since the Soviet collapse, indicating de-territorialization of the border, so that Russia is partly excluded from these new territorializations and partly included in them. Territorial discourses and practices at the state level are now diverging. In the broader context, territorial Finland is part of western Europe and the EU (and now also the forthcoming EMU zone) and speculations on possible NATO membership occupy a significant position in current Finnish society, all of which in a sense constructs an exclusive border between Finland and Russia. On the other hand, Finland has been very active in the EU context in opening links with Russia and including that country in a larger European space. Finland was particularly active in efforts to have Russia accepted as a member of the Council of Europe. Similarly, current efforts to develop a Northern Dimension in European Union policy have the same aim: to create economic links, particularly with northwestern Russian, in order to prevent environmental problems and to integrate Russia into the larger European space. These links are therefore not merely economic ones but also deep reflections of the aims of security policy elites. In spite of the still strict territorial control maintained at the border, the new spatial planning practices established by the Finnish and Russian authorities are producing new regionalizations that span this border. Thus the border region is now divided into four development zones, Southern Finland-St.Petersburg, Karelia, Arkhangelsk and Barents, each of which has its own problems and its own planning strategies based on cross-border cooperation. Increasing cross-border links are not looked on favourably everywhere.

Boundaries are both symbols and institutions that simultaneously produce distinctions between social groups and are produced by them. Nevertheless, they not only separate groups and social communities from each other but also mediate contacts between them. Borders provide normative patterns that regulate and direct interactions between members of social groups, rules on how to cross boundaries and rules governing the exchange of people, goods and symbolic messages.

As symbols, boundaries are mediums and instruments of social control and the communication and construction of meanings and identities. As institutions, they link the past, present and future together, i.e. they construct a continuity for social interaction. This makes the links between boundaries, nationalism and identity particularly strong. Since identity - or the representation of identity - is achieved through the inscription of boundaries, the question of power is essential. Cultural researchers in particular have studied the struggles and symbolic links between social groups, and this question is becoming an increasingly challenging one in a world of voluntary and forced movement and exile. Barth, for instance, puts more emphasis on boundaries than on identity, since the classifications constituting the grounds for identity mean in fact the construction of boundaries. Calhoun points out that though the concern for distinction may be universal, identities themselves are not.

The meanings of boundaries are thus underlined by the fact that identities are produced through boundaries. Identities are often represented in terms of a difference between Us and the Other, rather than being something essentialist or intrinsic to a certain group of people. While identity is based on differentiation, this should not inevitably take the form of opposition, of drawing a hard boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The production of boundaries is linked effectively with the social and spatial division of labour, the control of resourses and social differentiation

Recent studies on the construction of foreign policy discourses, understanding them as boundary-producing practices developed by the state, provide one interesting approach. Campbell, for instance, has examined the relations between identity and difference and how they are exploited in the construction of threats in foreign policy discourses, while the representations of threats serve in turn to secure the boundaries of a state’s identity. The Finnish-Russian border illustrates Campbell’s argument. The Soviet Union was the Other for the Finns, and before World War II this image held good both at the political level and in the national process of socialization. After the war Finnish foreign policy towards the Soviet Union was very cautious, and both the official ‘geopolitical truths’ and e.g. the representations of Finland's huge neighbour in national sozialization -school textbooks - became much more neutral. The boundary-mediated interpretations of the geopolitical context thus changed radically. This example illustrates why it is of great importance to examine how state boundaries become a part of the everyday life and the (contested) identity narratives existing in a state. This also makes it possible to understand why various generations living in the same spatial context may have quite different identities – they simply have different spatialized memories.

Boundaries are expressions of power relations. As institutions, they embody implicit or explicit norms and values and legal and moral codes. They are hence constitutive of social action and may be both obstacles and sources of motivation. The Finnish-Russian border is a good example of this duality. During the Soviet period the border areas of both the Finnish and Soviet side became typical examples of alienated borderlands, peripheral areas where all links were directed towards their own national centres. The border is the same today and border patrolling practices are still very strict, but since the collapse of the Soviet Union the border has no longer been a serious obstacle to cooperation, which now takes place across it in forms varying from environmental to cultural and from economic to regional planning projects.

The arguments of (postmodern) globalization theorists and the representatives of IR make it that the spatiality or geographical organization of power is not merely connected with the territorial state but may also ‘flow’ and manifest itself on all geographical scales. Power should not be understood merely as a commodity to be wielded by agents, usually the dominant social group, in order to control all the places and localities within a given territory. Power is diffused in global networks of wealth, information and images "which circulate and transmute in a system, of variable geometry and dematerialized geography". Power ‘flows’ in the codes of information and in the "images of representation around which societies organize their institutions, and people build their lives and decide their behavior".

What, then is ‘power’ in the case of boundaries? The major challenge for boundary studies is to analyze how the state-centred naturalization of space is produced and reproduced, and how the exclusions and inclusions between ‘We’ and ‘Them’ that it implies are historically constructed and shaped in relation to power, various events, episodes and struggles. Therefore one logical object of study is geographical concepts and terms, particularly boundaries, and how they have historically functioned within national discourses. An analysis of the activities of Finnish academic geographers and geography teachers, for instance, has shown that they have done much to shape peeople's understanding of the national territory through their representations and conceptualizations and that they have also effectively developed diverging concepts and categories to represent the boundary in specific ways. In a word, they have produced geopolitical scripts that have at times been put to effective use by the political and military elites of the state.

Since boundaries are an expression of the power structures that exist between societies, a major challenge for boundary research is to deconstruct such power relations in the form of boundary narratives. Boundaries may therefore be comprehended as flows of power in which memories are transformed into things of the present and future. It is of vital importance to analyze how certain rituals and symbols, discourses and practices of power have emerged, taken their current shape, gained in importance, and affected political decisions. This puts the accent on a contextual, culturally and historically sensitive approach to boundary studies.

"The rise and fall, the construction and deconstruction of various types of boundaries", Oommen writes, "is the very story of human civilization and of contemporary social transformation". This argument lends support to the key conclusion of the present paper: instead of simply accepting rhetorical comments on how boundaries are disappearing in the ‘world of flows’, boundary scholars should be more sensitive to the changing meanings of boundaries. They also should pay more attention to the contextual nature of boundaries and to the developing of approaches that are based on recent social, political and cultural theory.

Despite the effects of globalization, changing power relations and the meanings of sovereignty, environmental problems and the post-nationality arguments of postmodern theoreticians, the state will apparently continue to be the ideal form of organization for most nations at the turn of the millennium. This argument does not take for granted the much criticized realist viewpoint or the ideas on an anarchical world that exists outside organized states. It is based on the fact that the increasing complexity of the institutional organization and networks of the contemporary world will continue to be mainly organized by the state in the near future. Hirst and Thompson emphasize that the state may now have less control over ideas, but it remains in control of its borders and the movements of people across them. A large majority of the world’s people want - voluntarily or by force - to understand themselves as nations or to struggle to create their own sovereign states. It is also obvious that the majority of political, economic and military elites in the already existing states aim to maintain their state and its apparatus in order to retain or increase their own power and symbolic capital or that of their political parties or corporations.

An important challenge for boundary studies is that of searching for new conceptualizations by which to comprehend the changing meanings of boundaries. The latest interdisciplinary literature on boundaries makes it clear that the answers to questions regarding their disappearance are not simple ones, of the either-or type, because boundaries are no longer understood as physical, immovable spatial entities. The questions of context, knowledge, representation and power become crucial. Thus, in addition to empirical case studies on boundaries - which are continually of crucial importance - researchers will also have to develop abstractions to make the multi-dimensional character of territory and boundary building ‘theoretically visible’. This will help us to realize that traditional territoriality is increasingly turning into territorialities, i.e. more vague, overlapping spaces of dependencies and constellations of power. Hence, where as authors like Ohmae are ready to declare the death of nation-state and boundaries, pointing mainly to economic practices, boundaries still make a difference in the spheres of governance (and also in the governance of economic flows), culture and spatial identities and will also in the future provide interesting challenges for researchers.