Abstract
Borderscape is a concept in current critical borderlands research and defined as a multidimensional landscape of interacting spaces of conflict and encounter related to political borders. By analyzing studies of border research on South Tyrol, placed in their historical context, in this chapter the institutional, discursive and symbolic formation of webs of social, cultural boundaries, and political borders in South Tyrol are outlined. In the period of the formation of the European nation-states from the end of the 18th to the middle of the 20th century, numerous geographers took part in the debates on the establishment of South Tyrol’s administrative borders, weaving geomorphological forms and concepts such as the watershed between the Danube and Po basins, the main Alpine ridge, and the Alpine passes into the nationalist lines of argumentation on national expansion and protection against encroachments. Since the Second World War, a critical and post-nationalistic interdisciplinary border research on South Tyrol slowly emerges, which shows that, in addition to the state border to Austria, a language boundary emerged in South Tyrol as a further central axis of separation, which still today permeates the social and political order in South Tyrol. The present chapter illustrates that a change of perspective can be observed in regional borderland research on South Tyrol during the last 70 years, away from nationalistic research projects that seek to establish social and cultural borders, towards critical studies that show ways to overcome the boundaries and borders within the South Tyrolean population and beyond. In this recently forming borderland research on South Tyrol, geography plays a minor role, although it could contribute to social integration through location-sensitive research and the use of cooperative research methods.