Abstract
This article explores the particularly close relationship between area studies in the US and the
UK, in both of which we (like many of our colleagues) have each worked, over the first decades
of the twenty-first century. Drawing on a blend of firsthand experience and published research,
we find that area studies in the US has been shaped by geopolitical, especially defence, consid-
erations. Area studies in the UK has been more susceptible to market-related changes in higher
education provision, although these considerations too are affected by a range of geopoliti-
cal factors. In both cases, area studies has continued to be seen as intellectually incoherent at
best, as particularized in contrast to disciplines that produce “universally applicable” knowledge.
At worst, area studies has been dismissed as little more than the translation of great-power
geopolitics into the academic space. Amid this, though, we find encouraging signs that area
studies can help revitalize disciplines and rewrite how, why, and which “areas” (or relationships,
processes, etc.) can be considered salient in the first place. If we attend to what area studies
often does best – intimate engagement with plural local vantage points against the backdrop
of a globally connected world – then area studies, we find, can draw upon borderland ways of
thinking to remedy its own location in intellectual borderlands, just in the same way that geo-
political borderlands remake centres in real time.