This volume is the first transdisciplinary textbook of Cross-border Cooperation in Europe. 21 researchers and 8 high-level practitioners are analyzing the subject from an integrated point of view. The book presents the first holistic scientific and practical overview of the multi-dimensional policy-field of European Cross-Border Cooperation.

Has European integration helped to build peace in Europe and its neighbourhood? The book addresses this question through theoretically and empirically informed case studies that explore the successes of, and the challenges to EU cross-border cooperation as a tool for conflict transformation. Conceptually, the contributors link the question of transforming conflict to changing understandings of borders and bordering. Empirically, the contributions represent case studies of practices and discourses of EU-sponsored cross-border cooperation, and challenges to it. The case studies encompass the multiple geographical perspectives of the EU internal boundaries, its (sometimes disputed) external borders, and borders involving third countries. From a thematic point of view, the collection focuses on the intersection of two levels at which bordering processes unfold and are enacted: the level of governance, devolution and international intervention and that of grass roots or civil society efforts, including cultural cooperation and artistic production. The collection thus offers a kaleidoscopic view of border politics and conflict that zooms in and out of the EU frontiers and their geopolitics of peacebuilding, security and cooperation. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Geopolitics.

This publication is an attempt to enlarge the perspectives of Contemporary European Border Studies both temporally and epistemologically. Border studies in Europe are indeed still largely focused on the analysis of cross-border cooperation and its relationship with the process of European Integration after the Second World War. What is generally missing is a long-term historical perspective and the consideration that circulation and networks can also be built across borders because there is a community of ideas or a shared good to defend : a common scientific culture, health, environment.

The "deepening and widening" of the EU has thrown its changing internal and external borders into sharp relief. This work demonstrates that borders are key spaces within which issues such as identity, memory and trust, and communication between states continue to be played out and transformed.

This book discusses and evaluates the problems of governance within the European Union's cross border regions from diversity of perspectives and over a range of selected case studies.

What current discourses are relevant for border areas? What opportunities for and obstacles to integrated territorial development arise from the specific situation of border regions? How can these be utilised or overcome in a goal-oriented way? These questions were central to the discussions of the Border Futures working group. Border regions like the Greater Region or the Trinational Metropolitan Region of the Upper Rhine extend far beyond the immediate border area. While institutional structures of cooperation can be perpetuated through agreements and organisations, there is a lack of instruments which cross-border cooperation structures can deploy in response to changing situations. Cross-border cooperation faces new challenges from increasing cross-border interactions, processes of economic structural transformation, new energy policies in the national sub-spaces, and demographic change. Another factor is increasing spatial polarisation, which influences the further development and future viability of the affected border areas, and involves metropolisation issues in urban centres and the provision of public services in rural districts. Building on discussions of the Border Futures working group, this volume sheds light on cross-border cooperation in practice with recent research relevant to planning in border regions in the European context. The insights collected here are intended to be usable in the border areas within the territory of the Regional Working Group and should also contribute towards the broader specialist discourse on the further development of cross-border cooperation. Issues of sustainable cross-border governance, new spatial functions and new planning instruments play a role here, as do the possibilities provided by the current EU structural policy programming period for border areas