Boundaries

Boundaries are the edges of regions. This term often is reserved for political boundaries that mark the change from a region administered by one governing authority to that administered by a different authority. Although cities, counties, and provinces all are political entities and all have boundaries, international boundaries (those between states) are of special concern because states remain the highest level of political authority in the world. Current changes in the status and functions of states (e.g., loss of decision[Page 21] making over trade decisions to the World Trade Organization) are reflected in the status and functions of their boundaries.

Although boundaries limit state sovereignty and therefore the enforcement of regulations to state territory, there have been and will continue to be incidents where states attempt to or actually enforce their laws extraterritorially. Kidnapping suspected criminals residing in other states, for example, has been organized by both Israeli and U.S. government agencies. The Israelis eventually executed former Nazi leader Adolph Eichmann in 1962 after capturing him in Argentina, and Humberto Alvarez was released to Mexico in 1992 after being kidnapped to the United States and later acquitted of murder charges in federal court. International law prohibits extraterritorial actions, but the international community is unable to prevent them.

Nearly all existing international boundaries are defined by treaty and are demarcated on maps. Positional disputes over the locations of boundaries certainly exist but rarely lead to war. The United States and Canada, for example, still disagree over offshore boundaries in the Beaufort Sea and the Dixon Entrance. A few frontiers remain where areas—rather than lines—separate states, but these are impractical for regulating passage into and out of states or for developing resources and so have been progressively replaced by boundaries. Most of the few remaining frontiers are located on the Arabian Peninsula.

Although some boundaries are marked on the ground by walls or other structures (e.g., the U.S.–Mexico boundary between San Diego and Tijuana), the costs of construction are prohibitive; checkpoints along official crossing points are far more common. Aerial and electronic surveillance can be used for patrolling boundaries, but enforcement of state sovereignty along a state's boundaries is rarely absolute. Smuggling of illegal merchandise—whether it is drugs, people, weapons, or bootleg DVDs—is too lucrative for operators to cease their operations. The discovery of tunnels under the San Diego–Tijuana wall and elsewhere on the United States–Mexico boundary is evidence of the profits involved in smuggling.

State boundaries extend upward, downward, and offshore, increasing the resources and strategic locations under state authority as well as the possibility of conflict with other states. All mineral resources below a state's territory are under state authority, but states encounter difficulties when fluid resources (e.g., petroleum, ground water) flow into or from neighboring jurisdictions. For example, Kuwait was accused by Iraq of pumping oil from the shared Rumaila oilfield prior to Iraq's 1992 invasion. Airspace above sovereign territory—to the height of powered flight—is also under state authority. Invasion of airspace has resulted in arrests (e.g., of Matthias Rust, a German teenager who illegally landed in Moscow in 1987) as well as in destruction (e.g., the downing of Korean Airlines Flight 007 over the Soviet Union in 1983).

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