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The characterisation of the Western city through binary classifications seems increasingly inappropriate, first, because cultural fusions produce 'thirdspaces' which can only be captured in a more complex spatial language and, secondly, because a thirdspace politics is needed to resist the oppressions associated with binary oppositions. In this paper, it is suggested that the thirdspace arguments promoted by Soja neglect a history of resistance and academic critiques of binaries loosely associated with anarchism. Drawing on the 'British school' of object relations in psychoanalysis, it is also argued that the failure to think beyond binaries and to realise a thirdspace politics may be connected with the construction of the 'Western self' in a culture which is suffuse with oppositions of desire and disgust.

This special issue addresses the problematic nature of space, whether psychic, symbolic or material, from an inter-disciplinary standpoint. The diverse articles are concerned with legal, psychical, cultural, social and political boundaries. Spaces with legal meanings are the product of such boundaries, and the relation of law and space as explored by the legal geography literature underpins this collection, which investigates these issues at a range of spatial scales, from the scale of the self to the global. In considering the continuum of tension between fear and desire manifest in individuals' internalized boundaries, we need also to make use of theories developed in psychoanalysis and social psychology. Kleinian 'splitting', for example, offers an explanation of law's role in the creation and maintenance of strong boundaries which exclude 'othered' groups. Law's power as a discourse is challenged by internal contradictions at the international scale, when human rights arguments confront state territorial jurisdiction; while at the other end of the scalar spectrum, regulation of conduct depends both on accepted legal notions of the self-governing individual and on assumptions of shared moral values. Other articles in this issue emphasize the nature of boundaries as liminal spaces full of attendant ambiguity, which, although legally established and enforced, prove in fact to be remarkably permeable. The interdisciplinary perspectives developed in this issue demonstrate the need to further problematize boundaries and to acknowledge the complexity of material, social and mental spaces.