This issue of the CIDOB Journal of Afers Internacionals features the addresses and debates from two international seminars organised by the CIDOB Foundation in 2007 under the heading of “Borders: ‘transitoriness’ and intercultural dynamics”. The objective was to situate intercultural dynamics within a reference framework capable of introducing new concepts for reflection, and the issue proposed was the subject of borders. The concept of the border is used as a metaphor -- as that space for identification where the decision is made as to what is similar and what is different. Something which all human beings have in common is our difference from others and, through a shared "border", we discover what we are and what we are not, as well as the way in which "our" similarity represents "their" difference. Thus, reflection is focused on a present situation that is cosmopolitan, and which requires a cosmopolitan view to observe the increase in interdependence and to understand the new landscapes of identity, as well as to question ethnicity and the social organisation of difference. Identity is not an accumulation or a synthesis of different components, but rather a space of different forces that interact in order to determine what is similar and what is different. And the hybrid? Could that third space be the location in which the elements meet and are transformed?

ISSN: 1133-6595

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