Amy Reed-Sandoval’s Intimate Borders offers the first book-length discussion of borders and border practices from a decolonial and feminist philosophy perspective. It invites migration scholars to reconsider the nature of borders, moving past its Western idealization and accounting for the intimate entanglements that define them. Intimate Borders introduces an original and innovative tool to ethically scrutinize borders and bordering practices, contributing significantly to the field of migration ethics. This book should be therefore of great interest to scholars and students in the field.

Drawing on Indigenous philosophy and post-colonial geography studies, Reed-Sandoval convincingly argues for thinking about borders as intimate, namely as “enmeshed with our so-called ‘private’ lives, partly constitutive of our fleshy bodies, and cutting across our ‘selves’” (p. 4; Chapter 2). The term challenges the Western idealization of borders as fortified boundaries surrounding a state territory (p. 65), and it seeks to trace “how movement across borders can, at least, sometimes, constitute an intimate act of experiencing, articulating, and/or defending Indigenous identity” (p. 67). “Intimate borders” therefore captures how material geopolitical borders and bordering practices become part of border crossers’ bodily experience, mental life, and individual identity, affecting and shaping them in deeply personal and intimate ways.

Intimate borders are morally problematic when they become sites of intimate harm (Chapter 3). Drawing on feminist conception of privacy, Reed-Sandoval defines intimate harms as an unjust privacy loss that reduces and diminishes a person’s capacity i) to control another’s access to their intimate information; ii) to control their physical intimacy, iii) to make autonomous decisions about intimate matters, including the expression of love, liking, and care, and iv) to be free from privacy intrusions that reduce their opportunity for self-reflection, self-expression, self-enjoyment, self-development, and rejuvenation. The forced separation of families at many worlds (and, importantly, Western) borders is one of many intimate harms that this book makes visible. Alongside this, Reed-Sandoval extensively discusses abortion migration and children migration as two cases where the border becomes an autonomy-reducing intimate intrusion, affecting and shaping “one’s intimate experience of pregnancy” (p. 91, Chapter 5) and one’s childhood (Chapter 4).

Reed-Sandoval integrates philosophical analysis with ethnographic research bringing to light how gestating people construct and deconstruct borders and boundaries when moving across borders to seek abortion care (Chapter 5). Reed-Sandoval uses the stories she collected during her ethnographic fieldwork at two abortion clinics in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to illustrate what exactly makes borders intimate entities. As the author writes, an intimate border is “an entity that is itself shaped and transformed by the intimate experiences of which it is comprised” (p. 128, emphasis original). In this light, a border is not a mere line in the sand, but it is an entity that impacts “people and ‘selves’ whose boundaries can be destabilized through injustice” (p. 146) and is transformed by “people’s experiences of intimate harm” (p. 145). Reed-Sandoval defines an intimate border as a space that “becomes part of a person or community, and a person or community, in turn, becomes part of that border.” Thus, border crossers’ intimate entanglement with the border “extends beyond the moment(s) of one’s border crossing” (p. 9) and reflects “the extension of the intimate harm” (p. 145). Thus, the border becomes “partly constitutive of our fleshy bodies, and cutting across our ‘selves’” (p. 4; Chapter 2). With this definition, the author distinguishes her account of “the lived intimacy of borders” from approaches that treat intimate border effects as isolated, causal events. Reed-Sandoval also distances her concept from communitarian views that see national borders primarily as protectors of collective identity; instead, she examines how borders shape intimate experiences for both “members” and “non-members.” Her extended focus – understanding intimate experiences entangled with borders beyond their relation to national identity – helps challenge the binary distinction between members and non-members, since both can experience borders as intimately harmful.

A key commitment of Reed-Sandoval’s feminist migration ethics is to challenge border-related dichotomies. Alongside destabilizing the dualism of members and non-members, Intimate Borders also moves beyond other border-related dichotomies, including the public/private divide and the open/closed border dichotomy prominent in migration ethics debates. In the following, I present how Reed-Sandoval employs feminist thinking to turn away from these dichotomies. The feminist slogan “the personal is political” emphasizes that so-called private problems (including sex, abortion, childcare, and housework) must be addressed not as individual issues but as political struggles rooted in systemic inequality and patriarchal power structures (Hanisch, Reference Hanisch1970). Reed-Sandoval’s theory of intimate borders prompts us to understand borders – which have largely been treated as singularly public entities and matters – in an intimate, personal light. Reed-Sandoval takes the prevailing notion of borders – as public entities and therefore also political matters – and reframes them deeply entangled to the personal and intimate. With this move, Reed-Sandoval does not de-politicize borders, but she re-politicizes them by relocating the political significance of borders in precisely the ways they intrude and violate the intimate sphere of border crossers’ lives. In this way, Reed-Sandoval’s theory of intimate borders destabilizes a public/private divide that contributed to making invisible the intimate harms that many women, children, families, and other marginalized groups experience at the world’s borders.

In the last and concluding chapter, Reed-Sandoval advances the argument that “all borders have the potential to violate intimacy,” and thus all borders are morally suspect entities (p. 152, emphasis original). Reed-Sandoval invites us to critically assess world’s borders considering their inherent potential to violate intimacy while remaining attentive to the situated experiences of those who interact with them. By considering world’s borders as morally suspect entities for their potential to violate intimacy, Reed-Sandoval – on my reading – invites us to employ the lens of ambiguity in our ethical evaluation of borders. One key argument of the book is that borders have the capacity to affect, but the outcome is ambiguous. Indeed, some borders violate intimacy, while others do not and may even protect it. Ambiguity speaks to the way that we cannot disentangle our ethical evaluation of particular world’s borders from the lived experiences of people who cross or inhabit them. This means that any normative prescription must pay attention to border crossers’ particular and situated experiences of whether that particular actually protects or harms intimacy.

The tension between borders that protect intimacy versus borders that violate may represent a challenge to Reed-Sandoval’s goal of offering a universal theory of intimate borders. I think this tension becomes problematic if we define intimate borders as entities that violate intimacy. In this respect, Reed-Sandoval seems to suggest that a border becomes an intimate border when it violates intimacy (p. 18, p. 144). It thus appears that intimacy violation is part of the definition of what an intimate border is. This point is controversial, as it implies that a border serving to protect and preserve a marginalized community cannot be considered an intimate border. For example, this interpretation conflicts with the Zapatistas’ experiences of the Oventic border, which they perceive as beneficial for the preservation of their community. However, if we maintain ambiguity as part of the definition of an intimate border, whereby a border is intimate entity because it has the capacity to affect border crossers’ in deeply personal (and both in protective and harmful) ways, instead of because of the intimacy violation it generates, the abovementioned tension may pose less of a challenge to a universal theory of intimate borders.

Recognizing the ambiguity of intimate borders seeks, in alignment of the author’s argument, to acknowledge that the intimate engagement of a border cannot be predetermined neither as violent and harmful nor as protective and beneficial without a careful investigation of the personal stories of people crossing a particular actual border. In this respect, Reed-Sandoval’s analysis of the intimacy of borders in the context of refugees would have been stronger with a more nuanced discussion of the dual nature of borders, highlighting both their protective and potentially harmful dimensions. Reed-Sandoval indeed gestures toward a positive account of borders for refugees as “a national border is needed to protect against the harms one may endure in another state” (p. 160). However, this point could benefit from a more nuanced exploration of how borders can simultaneously undermine refugees’ intimacy and autonomy, even as they offer protection against the abuses they suffer in their home country (p. 158). In fact, several scholars have demonstrated the limited nature of protection refugees receive at borders or border spaces (Katz, Reference Katz2017; Parekh, Reference Parekh2020). For instance, in a recent piece, I examined how refugees in Europe are often confined to spaces that are not only physically but also symbolically representative of borders, and these border spaces can perpetuate privacy violations inflicting intimate harms upon their residents and undermining their autonomy in matters of love, like, and care (Toffanin, Reference Toffanin2026). This point underscores the importance of moving beyond understanding borders as either protective or harmful and instead recognizing their complex and often contradictory impacts on the lives of refugees. Therefore, a more consistent engagement with the experiences of refugees at borders could strengthen Reed-Sandoval’s analysis, offering a more comprehensive account of the ways borders affect and shape refugees in deeply personal and intimate ways.