Borderlands and Uncertain Governance: Authority, Identity and Security in a Changing Global System

Contemporary political and social transformations are challenging conventional understandings of governance, political authority and the role of the state. Growing geopolitical uncertainty, the fragmentation of authority, the increasing role of non-state actors, the emergence of overlapping identities, and the weakening of traditional boundaries between domestic and international politics raise fundamental questions about who governs, how authority is exercised, and where political legitimacy is constructed.
This panel explores these transformations through the lens of borderlands, understood not merely as territorial spaces separating sovereign states, but as dynamic political and social arenas in which authority, security, identity and coexistence are continuously negotiated among state and non-state actors. Borderlands provide particularly revealing settings for examining the changing relationship between state institutions, local communities, informal networks and transnational actors, as well as the ways in which political authority is constructed and contested across formal and informal boundaries.
Drawing on constructivist approaches, border studies and theories of governance, the panel challenges state-centric assumptions that equate effective governance primarily with territorial control and institutional capacity. Instead, it considers governance as a dynamic and socially constructed process through which competing understandings of security, sovereignty, belonging and legitimacy emerge and interact.
By placing borderlands within the broader debate on uncertain and changing governance, the panel seeks to move beyond the conventional dichotomy between state strength and state weakness. It explores how authority, legitimacy, security and identity are increasingly produced across multiple levels of political and social interaction, and how these processes challenge established assumptions about the boundaries of the state and the organization of political authority.
The panel therefore invites theoretical, conceptual and empirical contributions addressing questions such as: How is political authority negotiated where state and non-state forms of governance intersect? How do local and overlapping identities reshape political legitimacy and perceptions of security? What happens to conventional understandings of sovereignty when domestic and international boundaries become increasingly blurred? And what can borderlands reveal about the broader transformation of governance in an increasingly fragmented and uncertain global system?