We definitively live in strange times. Old borders are vanishing just before our astonished eyes, while new ones are rapidly emerging. The book Discussing Borders, Escaping Traps is a transdisciplinary and transspatial approach to investigating these vanishing, emerging and changing material and immaterial borders.

Throughout history, alliances have taken many different forms and they have been difficult to understand in their totality. As we now experience an unprecedented pandemic, which highlights the need for both external alliances between states and internal alliances between governments and populations, understanding alliances is more than ever critical to apprehend an open and interactive world that knows no borders and in which challenges imposed on humans are global. The book “Living Alliances, Leaving Alliances” is an interdisciplinary approach to investigating past, present and future alliances on an interpersonal, subnational, international and transnational level. It is the result of a two-year project by AreaS, a research group in area studies located at the Østfold University College in Norway.

In this anthology, researchers from Finland, Greece, Norway and the United Kingdom discuss how nation and identity are shaped in a modern multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-cultural society: by retaining a national identity in the context of emigration, by Measures taken to change an existing nation into a new one, by introducing a discourse designed to re-establish a putatively lost nation. The anthology contains articles in English, French and German from political sciences, history, linguistics, literature and translatology.