Whether they are ones marked abstractly on paper and then traced physically on the ground, heedless of the fate of those who may inhabit them ; ones crossed at the risk of death in search of a better life elsewhere ; ones contested or reemerging with greater or lesser vehemence after years and which thus become frontlines, scarring the flesh and spirit of too many people ; or even ones apparently surpassed from the inside, yet then hypocritically delegated to denote some form of ‘outside’ (including the perpetration of violence) ; the most elusive ones that pass through us and that, like it or not, serve to make sense of our experiences and to shape the way in which we conceive the world, borders are and remain – on both a practical and symbolic level – a complex and paradoxical phenomenon. If we try to reflect on what props up (or not) the notion of our living together in the world, they provide the playing field for a fundamentally existential game. On the one hand, every boundary identifies a critical point, one which urges us to find a way not to suffer the delimitations that are imposed upon us as supposedly natural ; on the other hand, however difficult and not to be taken for granted it might be, it asks us to keep imagining new ones. And with all the attention to and awareness of the human dimension that this should entail. But how might we do so ? And what does doing so mean today, in the face of the profound changes we are going through, in Europe and the world, and the explicit violence towards everything that is different which emerges with increasing nonchalance through the words and actions of those who govern and others alike ?