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New Salzburg Global report reflects on the challenges and opportunities that come with understanding, rethinking and resisting borders
Democracy in the US and across the world faces complex challenges. Social, economic, and racial divisions are driving political and cultural polarization. Gaps are widening between people and power, and internal and external authoritarian movements are directly challenging the nature of pluralist democratic societies and cultures.
Within that context, the geopolitical borders and boundaries of pluralist democracies are being contested, redrawn and remade. At the same time political and cultural changes around questions of race, class, ethnicity, and gender are transforming the landscape of borders within different democratic societies, and are redefining our understanding of democratic identity and resilience.
From September 19-23, Salzburg Global hosted Beyond the Nation-State? Borders, Boundaries, and the Future of Democratic Pluralism as the organization's 2023 American Studies program, and brought together an intergenerational, international, and inclusive group of approximately 50 academics, policy makers, journalists, artists, and activists.
The program explored the nature, contestation and renegotiation of boundaries within and beyond nation-states, and how they are changing the dynamics and representation of democratic pluralism. Fellows also looked at how American Studies as a field has engaged with borders, and what this means in other contexts and societies.
This report reflects on the challenges and opportunities that come with understanding, rethinking and resisting borders in order to foster democracy, equality, and social justice. It highlights some of the discussions participants had about the relationship between borders, national identities, and democratic pluralism, indigenous perspectives on modern borders, migration on the southern U.S. border, cultural borders and borders in culture, and American Studies’ engagement with borders.
Download the full report as a PDF
We also invite you to watch the 2023 Ron Clifton Lecture in American Studies. This lecture was inaugurated in 2018 to recognize the long service of the late Ron Clifton to the field of American studies at Salzburg Global Seminar.
This year marked the 76th edition of the Salzburg Global American Studies program, and the 2023 edition of the Ron Clifton lecture was given by Tracey Meares, the Walton Hale Hamilton professor and a founding director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School.
Watch the full lecture below: