The Routledge Handbook of European Borderlands revisits and reassesses the concept of borderlands in Europe, balancing case-specific perspectives with rich theoretical and conceptual avenues of research.

The significance of the transformations after the fall of the Soviet Union made European borders central to the emergence of border studies as an emerging field of study, and since then, the financial crisis, rising migration, Brexit, and the Covid-19 pandemic have continued to make European borderlands a focus of research, national and international policy, media, and everyday concern. Bringing together a wealth of cross-cutting and empirically rigorous international scholarship, the handbook investigates European borderlands as spaces of encounter and political, social, and cultural change. This book depicts borderlands as both fundamentally relational and ambiguous products of fanciful geographical imagination, as well as real and lived places in which communities engage in different forms of integration, differentiation and contestation, at many levels of political, economic, geographic, and social interaction. Drawing on a range of different disciplinary perspectives, the handbook covers key topics such as security, migration, social inequality and justice, cross-border governance, cooperation and development, environmental threats, health and disease, and conflicts over citizenship, sovereignty, and territory.

This handbook provides the perfect guide to understanding the multilayered complexities surrounding borderlands, and as such will be of interest to researchers across the fields of geography, politics, migration studies, international relations, anthropology, sociology, tourism, cultural studies, and European studies.