I am Associate Professor in Political Science at Halmstad University, Sweden, and I got interested in borders while embarking on a PhD program at Central European University, Budapest, in 2008. My research at the time focused on social capitals and development, and borderlands seemed like an interesting place to investigate that. Five years later I defended my dissertation, which comprised comparative case studies of cross-border cooperation organizations at the Hungarian-Slovak, Austrian-German and Norwegian-Swedish border. Since then, I have published on borders from different perspectives and in various collaborative constellations, but B-Shapes is the biggest research collaborative research project on borders that I have been involved in.