Professor Joel Migdal delivered his last academic lecture “BOUNDARIES AND BELONGING” on March 15 in PKU, which hosted by Professor Zhang Changdong, associate director of Institute of State Governance Studies.

　　In this lecture, he explored two sorts of boundaries that were deeply intertwined with territorial boundaries. One was the boundary between state and society, and the other was the boundary that separated groups whose members thought of themselves as “us” and those outside the group as “others.” The lecture argued that much of the dynamics of conflict and social change we saw in the world around us today were the clash of these varying sorts of boundaries.