In this paper we discuss the effects of nontrivial boundary conditions or backgrounds, including non-perturbative ones, on the renormalization program for systems in two dimensions. Here we present an alternative renormalization procedure such that these non-perturbative conditions can be taken into account in a self-contained and, we believe, self-consistent manner. These conditions have profound effects on the properties of the system, in particular all of its $n$-point functions. To be concrete, we investigate these effects in the $lambda phi^4$ model in two dimensions and show that the mass counterterms turn out to be proportional to the Greens functions which have nontrivial position dependence in these cases. We then compute the difference between the mass counterterms in the presence and absence of these conditions. We find that in the case of nontrivial boundary conditions this difference is minimum between the boundaries and infinite on them. The minimum approaches zero when the boundaries go to infinity. In the case of nontrivial backgrounds, we consider the kink background and show that the difference is again small and localized around the kink.
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