This special issue examines how Italian borders changed during détente, from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. It considers the border not as a mere geographic line, but as a political, administrative, and symbolic dispositif where security, mobility, control practices, and local experi-ences intersect. Across different scales, the essays reconstruct transformations in Alpine and Adriatic borderlands (Trieste, Alto Adige/South Tyrol, Friuli-Venezia Giulia) and in the mar-itime frontiers of the central Mediterranean, where the territorialisation of the sea and dis-putes over fisheries and energy resources generated new forms of conflict. The collection therefore proposes a non-linear reading of détente: opening and cooperation coexisted with selection, surveillance, and new vulnerabilities. By comparing land and maritime borders, the special issue highlights differentiated temporalities, while identifying the shared historiographical problem of the concrete reconfiguration of Italian borders in the later Cold War.