Building and transgressing borders in the Great Lakes region of East Africa

This paper serves as a thematic introduction to a collection of six articles published in this issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies, these having originally been presented at a conference on Mobiliteacutes, traces et frontiegraveres dans l'Afrique des Grands Lacs, XIIe-XXIe siegravecle, held at the Sorbonne, Paris, in October 2007. This introduction discusses the meaning of physical and social boundaries, and the limits and transgressions on boundary crossings in the Great Lakes region. We have chosen to use the term boundary in a broad sense, literally and metaphorically. The general theme of this collection of papers is the relation between society and space which translates into territories that in turn produce or modify ?imagined communities?. The collection of papers thus deals with both external and internal boundaries in the Great Lakes region.