Borders

Territorial borders are conventionally understood to mark the limits of nation-states’ territory and legal jurisdiction, distinguish one state from another, and demarcate domestic from international realms. For this reason, territorial borders provided a key point of departure for 20th-century studies of global political life. Yet borders have rarely been as clearly demarcated as the lines drawn on maps imply. The history of the modern state system is a history of cross-border trade, sovereign disputes, and unclear territorial jurisdictions.

In the contemporary phase of globalization, borders have become increasingly fragmented—both more and less significant for different kinds of traffic. Global trade agreements facilitate freer cross-border movements of goods, finance, and business people. At the same time, however, borders represent the site of unprecedented policing against unwanted migrants and contraband goods. The changing role of borders—their dissolution, reconstitution, and disaggregation—is central to processes of globalization that are transforming contemporary states and societies. These dynamics are addressed by scholarship within the specialized field of border studies and are of crucial significance to global studies more generally.

The territorial border finds its origins in the history of the European state system that is generally dated to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The treaty enshrined the principle of sovereignty within territorial limits, and borders were drawn to clearly distinguish the sovereign territory of one state from another. As Europeans colonized the Americas, Asia, Oceania, and Africa, new borders were drawn to divide new territories into the sovereign realms of various imperial powers. In the 20th century, anticolonial struggles established new borders again. Territorial borders generally rode roughshod over traditional systems for demarcating social, cultural, and political allegiances and only sometimes corresponded with existing geographic formations (or natural boundaries). Even today, territorial borders and centralized state authorities have only a partial grasp on the social, cultural, and political sensibilities of tribal, nomadic, and other traditional societies.

Histories of imperial conquest and modern state formation thus reveal that there is nothing essential or timeless about the borders of the past or those that we live with today. Some scholars refer to “bordering” as a process, to emphasize this point. From this perspective, borders cannot be taken for granted as self-evident dividing lines between one sovereign power and another. Rather, borders are made and remade through ongoing practices that serve, over time, to establish particular borders as matters of common sense and to frame the spatial environment through which we come to understand citizenship, governance, and other social phenomena. Approaches that emphasize this social construction of borders conceptualize borders in spatial and cultural terms. The border is interpreted as a “limit concept” in general, dictating the parameters of cultural identities as much as sovereign territories.

Understood in this way, the border is conceived as a site of political contestation. Different political actors may contest, on one hand, the position of the border in space. On the other, they may dispute the symbolic meanings invested in the border in terms of its relation to national, religious, or other social norms. Such disputes arose, for example, in the European context in the aftermath of World War I, when empires were carved into new sovereign states according to principles of national self-determination. Newly drawn borders were designed to mark the limits of distinct national homelands from which sovereign status was derived. Yet the populations within those states never corresponded to clear-cut distinctions in relation to nationality. The entire endeavor was consequently mired in disastrous tensions and violence between national majorities and minorities.

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