Outlining the main perception strands on the Hungarian-Romanian border

The analysis of borders between countries, societies and ethnic groups had been long in the forefront of academic scrutiny and public discourse. The theoretical narrative, however, did not remain unchanged throughout the decades. Whereas first it focused more on describing the location and history of the borders, later shifted towards the understanding of their functional content. Even though as early as in the 1960s scholars already pointed out that what mattered was the function and process of borders rather than their form and location and called for analysing the perceptions of the borders, this direction only gained real traction in the 1990s.