In 2016, the European Parliament and the Council adopted a legislative act creating and regulating a new European Border and Coast Guard Agency. Its Article 19 states thatshould a Member State's failure to control its own borders jeopardize the collective effort to monitor the external borders of the Schengen Areathe new Agency could take over the management of border control operations in that Member-State. This transfer of power begs a crucial question regarding EU's conflict of sovereignties. First, this article identifies three paradigmatic conceptions of sovereignty (traditional, post-sovereignist, and posttraditional), and, second, it applies them to our case study to assess which conception provides the best explanatory model. We eventually argue that the post-traditional perspective proves the fittest to capture the current integration of the EU's external border management, best described as an institutional bricolage (by contrast with a grand architectonic design).

Prominent radical democrats have in recent times shown a vivid interest in the commons. Ever since the publication of Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom, the commons have been associated with a self-governing and self-sustaining scheme of production and burdened with the responsibility of carving out an autonomous social space independent from both the markets and the state. Since the commons prove on a small empirical scale that self-governance, far from being a utopian ideal, is and long has been a lived reality, a few authors have attempted to turn them into the conceptual matrix of their own account of radical democracy. Negri and Hardt, on one hand, Laval and Dardot, on the other, have jointly coined the term ‘the common’ (in the singular) to suggest that the self-governance quintessential to the commons could be turned into a general democratic principle. Though this is an attractive theoretical prospect, I will contend that it fails to account for an important contradiction between the two theoretical frameworks it connects. Whereas the governance of the commons depends on harmonious cooperation between all stakeholders which in turn relies on a strong sense of belonging to a shared community, radical democracy is highly suspicious of any attempt to build a totalizing community and constantly emphasizes the decisive role of internal agonistic conflicts in maintaining a vibrant pluralism. I will further contend that the short-sightedness of radical democrats on this issue may be partially explained by the strong emphasis in the commons literature on a related but distinct conflict, that which opposes the commoners to the movement of enclosures. I will argue, however, that this conflict is not of an agonistic nature and does little to preserve the dynamism and the constant self-criticism proper to the radical democrat regime.

Borders have recently attracted a lot of academic scrutiny. Two very distinct types of literature have attempted to capture the current evolution of borders. The first one, leaning more toward the field of security studies, puts the emphasis on the rampant securitization, the coercive dimension of borders, and their divisive consequences. The second, looks at the rich environment surrounding borders, where boundaries are seen as the meeting point of a variety of cultures and communities. Those social spaces, known as borderlands, are the cradle of hybrid identities and transnational networks that contest the State's claim to ultimate sovereignty over its territory. Against this backdrop, the ambition of this special issue lies in its aim to fill theoretically and empirically this gap by looking at securitized borderlands. This introductory article delineates the contours of and puts together the main findings of both security studies on borders and borderlands studies. It announces the objectives of the subsequent articles, which together look into the interaction between the securitized borders and the social spaces they both obstruct and dynamize. In spite of and within this peculiarly adverse environment of "securitized borderlands," cross border societies remain in existence, resist, comply, and adjust. Paradoxical border(land)sBorders encircle the territory on which a State claims sovereignty and demarcate its spatial boundaries. They materialize the far edges of the State's monopoly on the legitimate use of force. They are thus limits that need to be defended and simultaneously contact points between states and their respective citizens.On the one hand, borders are the outer limits to the spatial scope of State's power and, as such, strategic lines that need to be defended against unwanted intrusions. From a historical perspective, States formation resulted from the successful waging of wars. It meant that new territories were integrated and powers centralized (Tilly 1992). Therefore, borders created States as much as States created borders (Anderson 1996). On that basis, the management of borders-and their much-discussed degree of permeability-

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