5 The Eastern Borders of the European Union: From Peace to Conflict – Introduction – Edina Lilla MÉSZÁROS * Investigating the meaning and utility of borders/frontiers and also their timely evolution, has been on the agenda of researchers since antiquity. However, the specialised literature does not offer the reader a unified approach on the definition, rationale or classification of borders/frontiers. While some pundits identify them simply as geographic structures, other scholars confer them political, financial, judicial, affective, ideological, cultural or even symbolical meanings. 1 Examining borders in terms of functionality, customarily, they were described as spatial demarcation lines delimiting the territory and the legal jurisdiction of a state entity. As regards terminology, the European and the American scholarly tradition have a different understanding of the concept under investigation. According to the European Border Studies, the border is an official delimitation line between collective entities, politically organised identities in states or equivalent of states, with a twofold identity, a political and a symbolical one. While from a political point of view, the function of the border is to protect a set of laws and regulations, in a symbolical sense, it appears as the defender of a set of norms, values, traditions and of cultural identities. Accordingly, a border is an imaginary line or area that delimits two territories or regions. This can be a natural border, in form of a mountain ridge or a river, or an artificial border, which was set up as a result of international agreements and treaties. Borders can be physical or virtual, and in some cases, they can be marked by fences, walls or other physical obstacles, as well as by checkpoints and border crossing points. Borders can be arbitrary as well, especially if imposed by foreign powers, and they can also represent a source of discord between states and a subject to territorial or political disputes. Some borders are particularly contentious, leading to armed conflicts and diplomatic tensions. In general, borders are important for defining and delimiting the sovereign territories of states and for establishing control over the movement of people, goods and means of transportation that are transiting them. 2 On the other hand, in the American specialised literature, the frontier is described as a moving zone of settlement, not a borderland or a border region as it appears in the European tradition. Even, the prominent American scholar, Frederick Jackson Turner in * Lecturer, University of Oradea, Department of International Relations and European Studies. E-mail: meszaros.edina@uoradea.ro. 1 D. Robert DeChaine, ―Introduction: For Rhetorical Border Studies,‖ in Border Rhetorics. Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexico Frontier, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 1; Edina Lilla Mészáros, ―Barbed Wire, Border Walls and the ‗Art‘ of Fencing out Migrants and Refugees: An Assessment of the EU and American Bordering Practices,‖ Research and Science Today 18 no. 2 (2019): 76. 2 Malcolm Anderson, Frontiers. Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 25; Mészáros, ―Barbed Wire, Border Walls…,‖ 77.