Volume 11, No. 1 (2026) of the Journal of Frontier Studies is devoted to the frontier as a multi-layered zone of contact, spanning historical “internal borderlands” and imperial peripheries, cultural representations, and new—including digital—spaces of interaction. The issue’s unifying concerns are the mechanisms of integration and settlement/appropriation, border regimes of power and identity, contact zones (ethnicity, migration, law, education), and the theoretical tools for analyzing the frontier in history and culture.

Drawing on Russian regional case studies, the articles demonstrate how frontier dynamics become legible in instruments of governance and inclusion, in logics of spatial development, and in cultural representation. They address, among other topics, military administration and the incorporation of nomadic communities, the transformation of regional centers under industrialization, and the ways in which the frontier motif functions in Soviet prose as a means of narrating “the boundary” and its overcoming. In each case, the frontier appears as an active milieu in which the collision of practices and institutions renders visible otherwise latent mechanisms of power and subordination.

The international section broadens the perspective through cases from Atlantic and European peripheries, the Afghan frontier viewed through nineteenth-century military and intelligence optics, periodical representations of the “Other” at the turn of the century, and narratives related to colonialism and its long-term consequences for Islamic education in Africa. These contributions are linked by a shared question: how is “periphery” produced and maintained—through law and administrative regimes, through migratory trajectories and gender orders, through media imaginaries, and through the symbolic construction of the “center” and the “border”?

The issue also advances the theoretical toolkit of frontier studies by revisiting the spatial dimension of Russian history and by exploring how the concept of the frontier can be extended to new environments, including virtual worlds and media practices that mediate human–nature relations. A further focus concerns migration and integration, examining migrants’ translocal life-worlds and host communities’ understandings of the norms and limits of “integration.” The volume is addressed to scholars in the humanities and social sciences—historians, anthropologists, cultural theorists, philosophers, literary scholars, and specialists in migration and intercultural communication—as well as to all those working on border regimes, peripheries, colonial/postcolonial problematics, and emerging (including digital) spaces understood as frontiers.