We developed our theoretical and methodological framework on bordering and carried out the bulk of our fieldwork while taking part in the EUBORDERSCAPES project (http://www.euborderscapes.eu) funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme 2012–2016.

We would like to thank all our partners from twenty-two universities in nineteen different countries in and around Europe for participating the many stimulating conferences and discussions that took place during these years. Special thanks to James Scott and Jussi Lane from the University of Eastern Finland who capably and tirelessly administered this very large and complicated project.

Special thanks also to the nine international teams who constituted with us Work Package 9, Borders, Intersectionality, and the Everyday, led by Nira Yuval-Davis. We cooperated closely and produced two special issues of the journals Ethnic and Racial Studies (Racialized Bordering Discourses on European Roma, 2017) and Political Geography (Intersectional Borders, 2018) in which we were able to pursue some comparative studies of our subject. Earlier versions of sections of chapters 1 and 3 were published in the special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies, parts of chapter 4 were published in Sociology, and parts of chapters 3 and 5 were published in the special issue of Political Geography. The material has since been updated and restructured around our developing argument; hence this book has been worked on and written exclusively by us, working in Britain.

We would like to thank the School of Social Sciences at the University of East London, and especially the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB), which provided us with a home during the project. We would also like to thank the central research administration team at the university and especially Jamie Hakim, for being such a supportive research administrator and media researcher for our team. And we want to thank all the national and international scholars who took part in the research seminars series on Bordering, which we ran at CMRB during the project.

Nira Yuval-Davis would also like to thank the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Umea in Sweden. The Centre enabled her, as a part-time visiting professor, to apply for and be a formal partner in the research project.

Our work would not have been possible without the close relationships we have developed with various grassroots organisations working on different aspects of bordering. With three of them – Migrants Rights Network (MRN), Southall Black Sisters (SBS), and the Refugee and Migrant Forum of Essex and London (RAMFEL) – we cooperated formally in producing the film Everyday Borders (2015), directed by Orson Nava and produced by Georgie Wemyss (see https://vimeo.com/126315982).

Our work would also not have been possible without the very many other individuals and organisations who helped us to get insights into different aspects of bordering, who put us in touch with the people we interviewed, and who facilitated the bordering encounters we observed. Among them are Doctors of the World, Sue Lukes, Migrant Voice, the Everyday Borders Consortium, Hackney Migrants’ Centre, Roy Millard, Emad Chowdhury, L’Auberge de Migrants, and Secours Catholique.

We owe a special debt to the many regular and irregular border crossers and workers who gave us the angle of their situated gazes on what bordering meant to them in and between Calais, Dover, Folkestone, and East and South London.

At Polity, we are grateful to John Thompson, who encouraged us to propose the project, and to the editorial team, which showed patience when the result of the EU referendum and the election of Trump in 2016 forced us to delay completion, as we sought to incorporate these events and embed the significance of bordering to governance and belonging in the context of contemporary political earthquakes.

Importantly, we want to thank our families and our close friends for their continuing practical and emotional support. As we are migrant families, bordering has been a subject close to all our hearts.