Boundary work and the (un)making of global cooperation: mapping the terrain

Abstract

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

… and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

‘Why do they make good neighbors?

…

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.’

—Excerpt from Robert Frost, Mending wall, 1914¹

There is plenty of ‘walling in’ and ‘walling out’ in contemporary global affairs. Some of the most obvious and deliberate examples involve the fortification or violent redrawing of territorial borders—from the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union—Brexit—to the persistent efforts by the administrations of Donald Trump to build a wall along the United States–Mexico border, to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine since 2014. While we seem to be witnessing a return of borders,² rather than the emergence of the ‘borderless world’ that some scholars believed possible at the turn of the twenty-first century,³ borders are not the only divisions ‘that continue to separate us’.⁴

In fact, boundaries structure the entire global governance landscape, extending far beyond individual countries' attempts to enact some form of separation from others. The massively expanding web of international and transnational ‘regime complexes’⁵ has led to numerous conflicts over the interpretation of norms and rules between international institutions, as well as between international institutions and individual stakeholders in national contexts.⁶ Together with the growing contestation of the liberal international order,⁷ these almost routine boundary conflicts are judged to have primarily negative consequences, propelling the greater fragmentation of the global governance system.⁸ As a result, International Relations (IR) scholars overwhelmingly sound the alarm about actors' waning political willingness and eroding institutional capacity to engage in forms of global cooperation that may help to promote long-term peace and prosperity.

At a time when boundaries seem to thwart global cooperation, this special section of International Affairs revisits the dynamics of (non-)cooperation through the concept of ‘boundary work’. In short, the contributors address the following overarching question: how do boundary work practices shape global cooperation? The received wisdom would have us believe that boundary work—a concept nascent in IR but widely established in the sociology of professions and in science and technology studies (STS)—largely undermines cooperative behaviour among relevant groups. Many empirical analyses indeed portray boundary work as an exclusionary practice that stresses differences and reinforces demarcations.⁹ From such a perspective, actors tend to buy into the proverb ‘good fences make good neighbours’. The prospects for cooperation thus appear meagre at best.

But what if boundary work is more open-ended and Janus-faced than most accounts allow? As the contributions assembled here demonstrate, boundary work is detrimental to global cooperation in some instances but conducive to it in others. As the relationship between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ is multifaceted and complex, actors can also undertake boundary work for (at least partly) inclusionary and cooperative ends.¹⁰ Rather than assuming that boundary work always serves to erect or fortify fences, we take the fences themselves as our analytical starting-point. Inspired by Andrew Abbott's relational ‘things of boundaries’ perspective, which suggests that an entity does not ‘have’ boundaries but is constructed through them,¹¹ the contributions examine how boundary work patterns the landscape of global cooperation. It is critical for our collective project to investigate the production and placement of boundaries because they can tell us something deeper about how global politics unfolds. In short, boundary work—broadly understood as a set of contingent ordering practices aimed at enacting difference and similarity—can make and unmake global cooperation. It may in fact be considered a meta-organizing principle of global politics, constituting the ‘global’ in the first place: its knowledges, its spaces and its identities.

This introductory article provides a point of reference for discussions about boundary work in transnational settings; it proceeds as follows. We begin by reviewing the literature on boundary work in sociology and STS, before drawing connections to scholarship on borders and boundaries in political geography, critical security studies and the broader global governance literature. Next, we introduce our relational and practice-oriented analytical framework, which is designed to foster a better understanding of transnational boundary work. We then organize the special section contributions into four thematic clusters to exemplify how IR scholars could harness conceptual advances in other fields for the study of transnational boundaries. The article ends with a brief conclusion that highlights the policy implications of the pervasiveness of boundary work practices in global governance.

State of the art

Thus far, conceptual and empirical interest in boundary work practices has been most pronounced in the intersecting fields of sociology and STS, as evidenced by the widespread use of the related concepts of ‘boundary work’,¹² ‘boundary objects’¹³ and, more recently, ‘boundary organizations’.¹⁴ Much research on boundary work has emphasized how certain social groups demarcate core areas of their competence (‘jurisdictions’) against competing claims by other groups. As Thomas F. Gieryn prominently argued in the case of scientists, these groups all strive to be seen as proper professionals.¹⁵ Such professional battles for recognition unfold in areas as diverse as architecture,¹⁶ health care,¹⁷ law¹⁸ or the social sciences themselves.¹⁹ Boundary demarcation also occurs when groups shore up their collective identity relative to others through practices of categorization, distinction and stigmatization along class, ethnic, racial, religious, sexual or gender lines.²⁰

A different strand highlights the sociomateriality of boundary work, which can manifest itself in the construction and negotiation of particular ‘boundary objects’ as bridges between otherwise disparate groups.²¹ In this vein, some researchers insist that boundary work can have inclusionary, rather than solely exclusionary, purposes and effects.²² Underlying all these approaches is, explicitly or implicitly, Abbott's ‘things of boundaries’ lens: ‘Boundaries come first, then entities.’²³ That is, entities are not fixed, but are constructed through contingent processes of making, remaking and unmaking boundaries.

Research on the dynamics and scope conditions of global cooperation has a long pedigree in IR, especially if we consider scholarship on political community-building and identity formation beyond the nation-state.²⁴ Rarely, however, has it engaged with the idea that boundaries are actively worked upon. Sustained theorization of the implications of boundary work for global cooperation has, in fact, been absent. This lack of attention is surprising, given that IR's foundational inside–outside divide implicitly assumes processes of successful boundary work, whereby the boundary between an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ is created to delineate an orderly national community from international anarchy. ‘Dissident’ IR post-structuralists, such as Richard K. Ashley, David Campbell and R. B. J. Walker, were instrumental in advancing this claim, with their critiques of state centrism in neo-realist theory and its assumption of pre-given units of analysis.²⁵ Campbell's analysis of US foreign policy, for example, exposes foreign policy as ‘a specific sort of boundary-producing political performance’ that discursively constructs a ‘foreign’ outside against a ‘domestic’ inside.²⁶

Such discursive approaches to the constitution of the international system through ‘inside’–‘outside’, ‘domestic’–‘foreign’ and ‘Self’–‘Other’ oppositions, were ground-breaking in the 1990s, inspiring the development of critical geopolitics in IR's neighbouring discipline, political geography.²⁷ In IR itself, the ideas of the ‘dissidents’ reverberated in post-structuralist work on the politics of identity and found widespread application in accounts of the enlargement agendas of the EU and NATO around the turn of the millennium.²⁸ However, much analysis remained wedded to an exclusionary logic of boundary-drawing and disregarded possibilities for less-than-radical constructions of the Other.²⁹ Explorations of inclusive boundary-spanning were conspicuously absent. Overall, these contributions paved the way towards understanding foreign and security policy as practice, but the dual quality of boundary work practices—their ability to differentiate and to integrate—was not rendered a research problématique in its own right.

This trend continued in critical security studies. From the mid- to late 2000s, scholars in this field sought to avoid what John Agnew called the ‘territorial trap’ by studying ‘bordering practices’,³⁰ rather than ‘territorially fixed’ borderlines.³¹ Together with an interdisciplinary group of scholars, including political geographers, Noel Parker and Nick Vaughan-Williams advanced the ‘lines in the sand’ approach, which foregrounds the malleability and elusiveness of boundaries, and spawned the thriving field of critical border studies (CBS).³² Adherents of CBS stress the processual ontology of borders and their performative dimensions, highlighting how the sovereign borderline has shifted both inwards and outwards in domains such as migration or security.³³ As a result, borders are now to be found ‘everywhere’,³⁴ policed through biopolitical or even necropolitical regimes of (humanitarian) control and care,³⁵ and supported by sociotechnical surveillance devices at fences, walls or refugee camps.³⁶ Such multifaceted border practices have led to conceptualizations of borders not only as networks or assemblages but as ‘meshworks’,³⁷ which can also include non-human agents.³⁸ Chris Rumford prominently democratized border practices and conceptualized ‘borderwork’ as a bottom-up activity of citizens to unsettle the idea of ‘bordering’ as an exclusively state-sanctioned practice.³⁹ Despite these significant advancements, CBS's language of ‘borders’, rather than ‘boundaries’, has tended to entrench IR's inside–outside divide. In most contributions to CBS, the territorially defined nation-state border has remained the centre of attention, with the focus placed on enclosures, not openings.

As some scholars in CBS are beginning to recognize ‘borderwork’ or its twin concept of ‘bordering’ as a subcategory of the more encompassing concept of ‘boundary work’,⁴⁰ it is now incumbent upon the wider IR community to theorize and empirically investigate practices of boundary work. This research agenda calls analytical attention to their variegated forms and dynamics, many of which extend beyond interstate relations. Lately, there have been some openings to this effect. Newer contributions emphasize the potential for cross-fertilization between STS and IR in studying the effects of boundary work not only in the national context, but also across national contexts and with regard to international institutions.⁴¹ A few studies analyse the conditions under which boundary organizations facilitate cooperation across knowledge domains in international regime complexes and/or fragmented governance spaces.⁴² Despite making inroads into bringing the concept of ‘boundary work’ to an IR audience, these studies tend to focus on boundary organizations (and their boundary work) in domains in which the science/policy interface has traditionally played a prominent role, such as biosecurity, environment or health. As a consequence, they leave unaddressed the applications and implications of boundary work practices in various other transnational domains.

Beyond the science/policy interface, there has been a much more modest uptick in IR research on boundary work. Recent studies clarify that boundaries are double-edged swords of exclusion and inclusion also among global governance actors. For example, a practice-theoretical article demonstrates how boundary work has forged a collective identity among diplomats from EU member states, despite diverging member-state interests and background knowledge.⁴³ Another analysis takes a Goffmanian stance on boundary work to show how international organizations demarcate their responsibilities on the ‘frontstage’ but cooperate intensely on the ‘backstage’.⁴⁴ Even without invoking the concept of ‘boundary work’, scholarship regularly points to persisting ambivalences in distinctions that govern humans and objects.⁴⁵ These diverse examples suggest that informal alignment and cooperation can, under certain circumstances, be more extensive than we would infer from formal differences enshrined in institutionalized boundaries.

More recently, the concept of boundary work has gained traction within the IR ‘practice turn’ literature, especially the ‘communities of practice’ framework.⁴⁶ Early praxeological contributions foregrounded how boundary work fosters the emergence of transnational communities of practice.⁴⁷ Scholars have also begun to look at the boundary work of different communities of practice within existing international organizations, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) or the World Bank.⁴⁸ Christian Bueger, Maren Hofius and Scott Edwards even advance a theory of global ordering on the basis of the interaction among various transnationally operating communities of practice, whose boundary work serves as a central mode of (re)ordering the spaces around and between them.⁴⁹ However, the authors leave it to future research to determine whether boundary work evokes global conflict or cooperation.⁵⁰ Without explicitly mentioning boundary work, Vincent Pouliot and Jean-Philippe Thérien show that transnational practices frequently generate opportunities for greater inclusion and, at the same time, new lines of exclusion.⁵¹ This nascent body of practice-theoretical scholarship offers an important point of reference and departure for our efforts to develop an analytical framework that squarely focuses on the multifaceted dynamics of transnational boundary work, involving processes of both inclusion and exclusion.

Our analytical framework

The special section takes a relational and broadly practice-based approach to boundaries by focusing on the transnational practices that make, remake and unmake entities. A relational ontology and epistemology⁵² can be found in a wide range of scholarship in social theory and more recently in IR, particularly in constructivist, critical, feminist, post- and decolonial scholarship.⁵³ Proponents of a relational ontology believe that ‘relationality is ontologically primary to any notion of “things” or “essences”’, making both humans and non-humans interact in a ‘relational universe’ that has to be understood from ‘within the relations within which [humans] process’.⁵⁴ A relational ontology therefore ventures beyond essentialism, questioning binaries common in western scientific thought, such as ‘ideas and matter, agency and structure, human and environment, nature and culture’,⁵⁵ or the ‘mind-world dualism’ found in positivist (social) science.⁵⁶ Relational theorists espouse a ‘pluriversal relationality’, which helps ‘to understand world politics as ontologically multiple, characterised by the entanglement of different cosmologies, each with different understandings of the relationship among all living beings including humans and the cosmos’.⁵⁷ This focus on situated knowledges—and the concomitant rejection of universalism⁵⁸—brings relational theorists into conversation with non-western traditions of thought, including Indigenous knowledges and Confucianism, that have long taken non-essentialist views on global interconnections.⁵⁹ Among these are also feminist, post- and decolonial approaches that seek to reconnect worlds and retrieve knowledge systems that have been erased or segregated by the ‘cutting logic’ of coloniality.⁶⁰

Recognizing the global power imbalance in favour of the global North and, thus, the ‘coloniality of power’,⁶¹ scholars have increasingly attempted to ‘decentre’ IR and ‘provincialize’ Europe through post- and decolonial thought.⁶² Critical findings that IR is Eurocentric⁶³ or ‘West-centric’⁶⁴ have led to calls for building a more ‘Global IR’⁶⁵ or for ‘deglobalizing’⁶⁶ it altogether. To realize these ambitions, scholars have to decolonize IR mainstream epistemes as part of a predominantly western and white⁶⁷ knowledge system shot through with ‘racialized hierarchies and erasures’.⁶⁸ Our relational ontology is therefore accompanied by a critical epistemological plea for ‘border thinking’, which the feminist writer and activist Gloria Anzaldúa developed and which was later picked up and popularized by the decolonial theorist Walter D. Mignolo.⁶⁹ In this spirit, we advocate a methodological view that is attentive to the lived experiences of those traditionally excluded from modern science by revealing how boundary work reflects the negotiation of identities, spaces and knowledges as sites of political struggle. While powerful actors may seek to guard their jurisdictions through seemingly mundane claims to competence, disempowered actors may start to contest these claims. In turn, they may withdraw from institutional arrangements that do not serve their interests, push for new standards of cooperation or, paradoxically, uphold collusive practices.

Practice theory has evolved across a range of fields, including but not limited to STS,⁷⁰ sociology⁷¹ and, again, also IR.⁷² Informed by these diverse bodies of scholarship, the special section explores concrete practices of ‘boundary work’. Introducing the relational concept of ‘boundary work’ to the field of IR foregrounds the contingency of boundaries as capable of obstructing and fostering global cooperation, which avoids the conventional assumption that they merely do the former. The special section thus sheds light on how exactly boundary work affects global cooperation in different contexts and sites. We start from Brendon Swedlow's baseline definition of boundary work as consisting of ‘[e]fforts to construct, maintain, or tear down distinctions between types of human practices or activities, including institutions (patterns of relations)’.⁷³ We extend this definition by incorporating blurring as a distinct boundary work practice that is neither maintenance nor teardown.⁷⁴ This extended definition captures a range of practices relating to boundaries, as well as borders as their most reified and, thus, most visible manifestations.

To better understand the nature and dynamics of boundary work, the special section zooms in on the actors engaged in boundary work, particularly their means and ends. Doing so stresses the role of agents of boundary work, thereby also pointing to its performative dynamics. Ann Langley et al.'s threefold typology is useful in this regard and here serves as our primary heuristic: it distinguishes between ‘competitive’, ‘collaborative’ and ‘configurational’ boundary work.⁷⁵ These concepts are ideal types that, rather than existing in their pure form, can blend to varying degrees.⁷⁶  Competitive boundary work is driven by a group's attempts to delineate its domain of competence by setting itself apart from other groups. It aims at reproducing power relationships, including a group's expertise, authority and/or legitimacy, and usually culminates in the exclusion of other groups, which can provoke contestation.⁷⁷  Collaborative boundary work, by contrast, seeks to facilitate interactions across boundaries to solve collective action problems. Here, boundaries are ‘negotiated, aligned, accommodated and downplayed to get work done’.⁷⁸  Configurational boundary work, finally, can leverage the aforementioned two types, with actors external to the boundaries in question deploying boundary work to bring about a specific change in the behaviour of other actors, the design of the boundary or its ‘landscape’.⁷⁹ In other words, a third party intervenes to reconfigure boundaries organizing other actors' activities, with analytical emphasis placed ‘less on the boundaries themselves and somewhat more on the potentialities of the “spaces” bounded by them to serve collective purposes’.⁸⁰

We combine a focus on boundary (re)configurations—construction, maintenance, blurring or teardown—with Langley et al.'s typology of boundary work (as summarized in the preceding paragraph). At first glance, boundary maintenance would seem to align with the competitive type of boundary work, while boundary blurring and teardown appear to be effects of collaborative boundary work. This may, however, be more complex in practice. For instance, competitive boundary work might first blur or even tear down soft boundaries—which facilitate cooperation—to subsequently erect sharper demarcations. Conversely, collaborative boundary work may serve to maintain boundaries conducive to coordinated collective action around an agreed division of labour. Moreover, informal boundaries often do not map neatly onto formal ones.⁸¹ Because boundaries can be manifold—ranging from highly visible and reified geographical borders to invisible and informal symbolic boundaries—we propose to study them in an abductive fashion. In line with Abbott's approach and ethnographic calls to ‘follow the conflict’, as well as affected agents and objects, our methodological access point is the identification of transnational boundary disputes, whether they are latent, virulent or (temporarily) settled.⁸² Zooming in on such disputes across various sites of global governance allows us to examine how specific types of boundaries (such as epistemic or jurisdictional boundaries) are negotiated through particular types of boundary work (as in Langley et al.'s typology). To slightly adapt Abbott's insight, transnational ‘things of boundaries’ are best understood through boundaries structuring global politics, rather than the things themselves.⁸³

Applications of boundary work: overview of the special section

How can the proposed analytical framework be brought to bear on specific IR research projects? In this final section, we begin with a brief overview of the orienting questions for this special section, followed by a structured discussion of the individual contributions that apply a boundary work perspective to various domains of global politics. The following questions helped to operationalize the main research question for our collective project:

• Where is boundary work practised, and by whom?

• Under what conditions do transnational boundary disputes become especially prevalent? When are they less likely to occur in the first place?

• What is the materiality of boundary work? When and how are boundaries made (in)visible?

• What determines the success, or otherwise, of boundary work in global politics?

• Which boundary work practices are most conducive towards enabling global cooperation?

• What forms of global cooperation do these practices further or undermine?

• What implications do practices of constructing, maintaining, blurring and tearing down boundaries have for authority and legitimacy in global politics?

The eight contributions assembled here employ various qualitative methods, particularly interviews, ethnographies and document analysis, to answer these questions. To obtain a clearer picture of how the articles speak to each other, we asked our authors to provide summative information across a few basic categories: focus, agents and types of boundary work (offering Langley et al.'s three types as options), and lessons for global cooperation. In terms of focus, we discerned three classes of transnational ‘things’ (following Abbott) that could be made, remade or unmade through boundary work practices: 1) knowledges, 2) spaces and 3) identities. Notably, some analyses cross-cut this categorization by focusing on two or all three things, which leads to a total of four thematic clusters. In what follows, we preview the special section contributions along these lines, based on our authors' own descriptions.

Two articles follow the burgeoning line of STS-inspired research on the science/policy interface and post- and decolonial scholarship to spotlight the effects of boundary work on the production and politics of transnational knowledges. Amy A. Quark and Elizabeth Jacob open the special section by investigating the competitive and collaborative boundary work of transnational standard-setters around scientific knowledge underpinning regulatory standards for infant formula. Their case-study shows how macro-level factors, specifically new configurations of power in the increasingly neo-liberal international trade regime, have pushed actors from the global North towards cooperating more with China, while continuing to exclude other global South actors from transnational standard-setting.⁸⁴ Thomas Kwasi Tieku and Amanda Coffie examine the legacy and impact of colonial epistemologies on the prospects of regional integration in Africa. Their article highlights that the African Union has effectively perpetuated the former European colonizers' border episteme through practices of competitive and configurational boundary work, thereby belying its self-portrayal as an anti-colonial entity and spurring intra-African conflicts, rather than enhancing regional integration.⁸⁵

The next article exhibits a strong interest in boundary work that targets international spaces. Drawing on critical security and critical border studies, Bahar Rumelili analyses how configurational boundary work that underpins the construction of ‘macro-political’ boundaries of two regional intergovernmental organizations (RIOs)—the EU and ASEAN—affects the relations between their member and non-member states. As the chosen case-studies demonstrate, the likelihood of conflict between these two groups crucially depends on how RIOs design specific boundaries through their membership and enlargement policies, making bilateral and hierarchical relations more prone to conflictive relations.⁸⁶

The subsequent two articles portray boundary work as a relational practice through which transnational identities are (re)negotiated. In this sense, Matthias Kranke contends that overlaps between international organizations (IOs) can lead to identity stress, which IO representatives then try to attenuate by striking a balance between competitive and collaborative boundary work. In the case of the closely tied Bretton Woods institutions, the telling of ‘atrocity stories’ about the other side enables regular cooperation, because each organization can still lay credible claims to sufficient distinctiveness.⁸⁷ A remarkably similar interplay of competitive and collaborative boundary work surfaces in an entirely different transnational setting, as Jozon A. Lorenzana's account of Filipino migrant workers in urban India shows. Confronted with intersectional biases embedded within distinct social hierarchies in their new workplace, Filipino migrants resort to emotional performances that help them to handle professional roles as a condition for enhanced mutual understanding and, eventually, cooperation.⁸⁸

The remaining three articles combine two or all three research focuses. Two articles examine both knowledges and spaces. Silvia C. Ruiz-Rodríguez and Alice B. M. Vadrot document how all three types of boundary work play out in defining the boundaries of Ecologically or Biologically Significant Areas (EBSAs) to conserve marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction. As the authors highlight, designating EBSAs becomes a highly political process in which different knowledge producers compete for authority and legitimate ways of knowing, with scientists eventually marginalizing the epistemologies of certain groups, in this case Indigenous peoples and local communities.⁸⁹ By contrast, Victória M. S. Santos and Ned Littlefield focus exclusively on configurational boundary work to trace how transnational security practices have contributed to the remaking of the traditionally separate operational domains of soldiers and police officers. The trend towards militarization in Mexico over four decades exemplifies such boundary reconstructions, which are enmeshed in the wider circulation of new types of security knowledge.⁹⁰ The final article addresses boundary work practices around knowledges, spaces and identities at the same time. Hannes Hansen-Magnusson and Charlotte Gehrke close the special section by exploring how geopolitical pressures reshape cooperation in Arctic governance forums. They find that collaborative boundary work among various regional bodies has effectively compensated for the Arctic Council's declining power following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, making Arctic governance resilient even as more competitive forms of boundary work have redefined knowledges, regional spaces and actor identities.⁹¹

Table 1 presents a summary of key patterns identified across the articles. Taken together, the contributions help to illuminate some core empirical dynamics surrounding global cooperation in various transnational settings. As we learn from this collection, there is, most notably, no straightforward link between any type of boundary work and global cooperation. In fact, cooperation is frequently fostered through combinations of competitive and collaborative forms of boundary work, rather than collaborative boundary work alone. The analyses reveal how various types of agents redraw diverse boundaries to lend credibility to certain policy proposals, to effect new divisions of competence and to bestow themselves or others with additional authority. Equally, they demonstrate how actors from distinct groups or institutions create links across boundaries, thereby blurring the formal lines of distinction and enabling new possibilities for alignment, identity-building and, thus, cooperation. The concept of ‘boundary work’ draws our analytical gaze to the ensuing shifts in authority and decision-making power, but also to the struggles for legitimacy among competing actors in transnational settings.

The concept's purchase is all the stronger given the ongoing institutional changes and, indeed, increasingly frequent ruptures across the global governance landscape. The dynamics of growing fragmentation, polycentricity and complexity of many governance arrangements imply a multiplication and diversification of relevant actors and boundaries.⁹² Under such conditions, analysts need to pay close attention to how institutional change affects boundary work, and vice versa. As a relational concept, boundary work encourages us to think about how diverse practices of categorization and classification constitute global orders.⁹³ Boundary work is thus shorthand for a set of practices that act upon orders at different scales in a contingent fashion: sharp hierarchies are possible, as are flatter forms of relations. More generally, exploration of boundary work practices promises to garner new insights into how certain issues are turned into problems that call for global cooperation in the first place.⁹⁴

Conclusion

This special section revolves around the concept of ‘boundary work’, which is still more prominent in sociology and STS than it is in IR. We have, however, shown in this introductory article that the concept speaks to a rich scholarly tradition in political geography and critical security studies with the related vocabulary of ‘bordering’ and ‘borderwork’. Recent combinations of STS and IR have begun to delve more deeply into boundary processes, but their focus typically still rests on ‘boundary organizations’ in which the science and policy worlds meet. Building on these various strands, we propose that ‘boundary work’ is a more encompassing and appropriate meta-concept: it enables us to treat borders as one specific type of boundary without succumbing to state-centric reasoning, and to study a plethora of non-territorial boundaries even if they do not run between realms of science and policy. In line with research in other fields, we have argued that boundary work does not necessarily exacerbate exclusion or stoke conflict. Indeed, it can be used for realignment and integration as much as it can be used for demarcation and separation.

While the jury is still out on the exact causal mechanisms between boundary work and global cooperation, the findings from the collection have tangible policy implications. At the most general level, boundary work can alter the prospects of global cooperation—an aspiration worth protecting in an era of populism and extremism, geopolitical rivalry and institutional disengagement. To understand and navigate today's divides, practitioners should be aware of the boundaries that constitute these divides, and of the possibilities to rework such boundaries for the sake of lasting reconciliation and genuine cooperation. The savviest among them will recognize what we collectively highlight in this special section, namely that collaborative boundary work often does not lead to global cooperation; at times, it stokes conflict. By contrast, a dose of competitive boundary work can open the door to forms of cooperation previously impossible or even unthinkable. Ultimately, boundary work remains a contextual double-edged sword. Not only do its effects depend on the level of actors' principled commitment to global cooperation (or lack thereof), the inclusion of some actors may also go hand in hand with the exclusion of others. We thus conclude on a twist of Alexander Wendt's famous dictum: transnational boundaries are what actors make of them.⁹⁵

Footnotes

Author notes