Globalization did not suppress the borders; it transforms them, dislocates them, and dissociates them from one another. Some economic activities, for instance, do not have the same scope or extent of the political activities or of those of the communications. The frontiers are multiplied, enlarged, and so become more fragile and uncertain. The present moment of the globalization process brings us two questions in relation to the possibility of living in a global scale. On one hand, a growing number of borders are transformed into walls, more migrants die in oceans, deserts, mountains, trying to cross closed borders. On another hand, the philosophical and political question of cosmopolitism returns to the agenda in a different context from that of the Enlightenment, but that formulates, concretely, the same questions. From the ethnographies of “borders-men” and “borders-places” (Borderlands), the article proposes thinking a new cosmopolis, considered as a world in movement which anticipates the trivial and everyday form of cosmopolitism. In the anthropological sphere, such is a new situation in which culture and sociability are defined in more and more constant border situations.
Borders; Globalization; Cosmopolitism; Borderlands; Conflicts