The first time I encountered the Polish–Belarusian border I passed beyond it without realising. The marker was in the demesne of a church and something about its haphazard placement in the landscape did not resonate with my expectations of an international border. I had fallen into the trap of thinking of borders as they are drawn on maps: absolute, clear lines across space and place. But they are not. They are – as this book proposes – grey zones, blurred and imprecise, nebulous, difficult to locate, contradictory and insecure. The border is a physical place and also a process, one which has multiple inputs often called ‘conceptual borders’: history, landscape, economics, governance and culture (Kaneff and Heintz 2006; Paasi 1999). In my fieldsite in eastern Poland understanding the border as a place and process resonated strongly. Each of the conceptual borders above had their own boundary line and together they ensured that the frontier on which my fieldsite stood was far from unchanging. The marker on the church lands was just the latest in a number of signs intended to draw a clear line where none existed. In what follows I posit that one of the processes destabilising the idea of a singular, static and timeless border in my fieldsite was that of alternative, supplementary and peripheral trading practices. How these practices were undertaken and discussed was part of a constantly constructed, refined and reconstructed border grey zone where the concept of the ‘inside’ remained potent (Green 2005; Perera 2007, 2009).

My particular approach to grey zones emerges from the work of anthropologists interested in corruption and informal networks, particularly Wolf (1966) and Robertson (2006). In an article called ‘Kinship, friendship and patron–client relationships in complex societies’ Wolf explores the resources and organisations that exist in those zones perceived as the ‘grey areas of the map’ by the ‘key centres of control’ and the relationships between these two categories (1966, 6).