Overview and Background

Territorial boundaries can be external, separating states and empires from each other, internal, as in federal sovereign units, or both. Human boundaries do not always align with territorial ones, but they shape how people migrate, gain membership or citizenship, and experience social, economic, and political power. From March 2022 to July 2024, Columbia World Projects partnered with the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge to study when and how boundaries become barriers. The project focused on how certain borders block people, ideas, and goods from moving freely, and how they can limit access to places, roles, or opportunities reserved for only a few.

Summary

In recent years, political turmoil in both North America and Europe has focused on barriers to movement. Rising nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, religious intolerance, and protectionism have all limited the cross-border flow of people, goods, money, ideas, and information. On top of that, the COVID-19 pandemic added new personal and global restrictions.

These growing barriers, often driven by fear and mistrust, are putting major pressure on liberal democracies and constitutional systems.

The Barriers and Borders initiative aimed to strengthen trans-Atlantic research collaboration by building a network of scholars focused on these issues. It brought long-term, analytical, historical, and conceptual attention to how and why these barriers are created or revived — and what they mean for societies today.

Through visual and textual explorations, the project provided a platform for researchers to think systematically about borders, including their origins and different institutional arrangements; identify points of similarity and variation behind their manifold beginnings and structures; investigate the impact of border regimes and spaces on people’s lives; and explore how choices about the character of borders shape the character and prospects of liberal democracy.