The workshop addressed three questions about state borders: How historically established must the borders be in order to have influence? How homogeneous – encapsulated by state borders – are national cultures in character? How does one account for the changing regulatory capacity of transnational ties in the contemporary world? The issue we raise in the book is how state borders and borderlands act and how they become taken-for-granted, how they perform, how they are negotiated, discussed, invented, and/or, at the same time, how they are undermined, dismantled, de-constructed, and bridged over. In three thematic panels – power of / at the borders, borderland memories, and borderland cultures – the workshop presented case studies from Polish-Belarusian, Polish-Ukrainian, Czech-German, and Czech-Polish-Slovak borders.