In the first chapter, the editors analyse the link between materiality and borders as a political project that emanates from the separation between similarity and difference. To what extent is the mediation between materiality and immateriality in the various manifestations of border-making carried out through assumptions at the basis of particular forms of governance? What kinds of subjects do borders produce, and to what extent is the materiality of borders sustained or undermined by these forms of subjectivity? What are the diachronic connections and disconnections between material borders and the identities they interpellate? What kinds of structures (material and conceptual) sustain and undermine borders? In critically exploring the mediation between material and immaterial we ask what the interaction with, contemplation of, and experience of borders enables. At what horizon does agency (as corollary to power) begin to be reconstituted as a more complex but also clearer instance of state–subject relations?