The CIBR Website

WELCOME to the Centre for International Borders Research (CIBR) website. On this site you will find details about the Centre and its activities as well as resources for scholars and students of state borders and borderlands.

CIBR - The Centre

The Centre for International Borders Research (CIBR) is an interdisciplinary centre for empirical, comparative and theoretical study of international borders and border regions. Based at Queen's University Belfast, it builds on Northern Ireland's advantages for border study and the research interests of a core group of academic staff. It has links with the Centre for Spatial Territorial Analysis and Research (C-STAR) at the School of Geography, and complements and co-operates with the Centre for Cross Border Studies which promotes policy-related research on cross border co-operation on the island of Ireland from its base in Armagh. CIBR is also in the process of forging links with other research institutions internationally, most recently with the Association of Borderlands Studies (ABS) with whom it maintains an extensive bibliography on borders..

CIBR - Research Programme

CIBR's research programme addresses the reshaping of borders by contemporary globalisation, European integration and the increasing cross-border flows of goods, people, capital, labour, ideas and information. Traditional ideas about borders are being challenged in complex and contradictory ways. Yet, borders remain pivotal to practical issues of economic development, social welfare, cultural identity, ethno-national conflict, political surveillance, sovereignty and democracy.

CIBR - Aims & Activities

CIBR initiates, supports and publishes work on:

• relationships of state borders with ethnic and cultural boundaries

• frontier societies, border communities and cross-border regions

• cross-border co-operation, policy networks and governance and the relationship of territorial management to alternative non-territorial mechanisms of regulation

CIBR promotes research activity on international borders, organises conference and seminar events and a refereed, electronic Working Papers series, and is committed to maintaining and further developing links with other border researchers and centres in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere.

CIBR - Recent Project

CIBR has recently been involved in a two-year collaborative project, entitled Mapping Frontiers, Plotting Pathways: Routes to North-South Cooperation in a Divided Island that was commissioned by the Higher Education Authority in the Republic of Ireland, and included as partners the Institute of Governance and Centre Cross Border Studies at Queen's University Belfast, the Institute for British-Irish Studies and Institute for the Study of Social Change (Geary Institute) at University College Dublin, as well as Democratic Dialogue. A series of Working Papers from the project are now available on line.