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This article advances the understanding of borders with respect to their epistemological, ontological, and empirical intersections with violence and conflict, which remain understudied within critical border studies. Specifically, the article explores the potential of recent interdisciplinary research on the border–migration nexus to find critical resources that might foster a better understanding of the complex relationships between borders, violence, and conflict. From this viewpoint, the border is not only a site of the founding violence of the sovereign power, but borders – reconceived as borderscapes – can also be regarded as a site of generative struggles where alternative subjectivities and agencies could be shaped. The article concludes with a call for an applied, committed, and engaged research capable of recovering its inherently political dimension moving towards a ‘politics of hope’ and beyond the simplistic yet dominant interpretations of the border–violence–conflict intersections, which are trapped in the ‘politics of fear’.

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Background. Research on mood disorders has progressively focused on the study of seasons and on the mood in association with them during depressive or manic episodes yet few studies have focused on the seasonal fluctuation that characterizes the patient's clinical course both during an illness episode and during euthymic periods. Methods. 113 euthymic outpatients 46 affected by major recurrent depression and 67 affected by bipolar disorder were recruited. We evaluated the impact of clinical “rhythmical” factors: seasonality, sleep disturbance, and chronotype. Patients completed the SPAQ+ questionnaire, the MEQ questionnaire, and the medical outcomes study (MOS) sleep scale. We used t-test analyses to compare differences of clinical “rhythmical” and sociodemographic variables and of differences in the assessment scales among the diagnostic groups. Results. Patients reporting a family history for mood disorders have higher fluctuations throughout seasons. Sleep disturbance is more problematic in unipolars when compared to bipolars. Conclusions. Sleep, light, and seasonality seem to be three interconnected features that lie at the basis of chronobiology that, when altered, have an important effect both on the psychopathology and on the treatment of mood disorders.