Abstract

From the northern and state-centric perspective, there are no borders without international relations and no international relations without borders. Paradoxically, the areas surrounding borders, the transborder spaces, have received little attention from the traditional paradigms of the International Relations (IR) discipline. Two factors have been critical to this phenomenon: the traditional agenda of the discipline related mainly to northern concerns, namely Western Europe and North America, and epistemological positions based on state logic that exclude other regions and dynamics. This article analyzes this paradox from a Latin American perspective and explains how transborder spaces are relevant for IR analysis in this region. Finally, it builds on the discussions on the epistemological turns in the IR discipline to propose two strategic and complementary methods to integrate and investigate them: the comparative method and multiscalar imbrication.