The main question of the project concerning the theoretical approach is how to conceptualize the reproduction of national borders. Basically, national borders can be seen as common social institutions which shape the behavior of people but at the same time borders have to be enacted by those people in their routines and habits. If suddenly everybody decided to ignore them, they would become irrelevant for social processes and thus would cease to exist as a social construct.
Usually, sociology takes the reproduction of social constructs as given and concentrates on analyzing processes of social change. Nevertheless, to be able to explain the continuing reproduction of national borders it is important to take processes of social stability and inertia into account, which until now only play a small role in the analysis of social institutions.
I will account for those considerations by approaching national borders from an action theoretic point of view. Of course I do acknowledge that legal and political instituions and economic developments play an important role in the creation of borders but I will focus on the development of common behavioral structures and border-crossing routines. Those, in my view, play a central role which until now has been if not underestimated at least under-researched.
In this project I will consider the reproduction of national borders as an unintended byproduct of intended actions which can in its reasons be or be not related to the border. With this I am following Anthony Giddens in his dual approach to social structure which is “accidentally” produced by people minding their own business and following their own reasons, beliefs and routines.
