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The Continuing Relevance of Borders inContemporary ContextsHeather N. Nicol a & Julian Minghi ba Geosciences Department , State University of West Georgia ,Carrollton , GA , USAb Department of Geography , University of South Carolina ,Columbus , SC , USAPublished online: 01 Aug 2012.

To cite this article: Heather N. Nicol & Julian Minghi (2005) The Continuing Relevance of Borders inContemporary Contexts, Geopolitics, 10:4, 680-687, DOI: 10.1080/14650040500436647

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Geopolitics, 10:680–687, 2005Copyright © 2005 Taylor & Francis, Inc.ISSN: 1465-0045 printDOI: 10.1080/14650040500436647

FGEO1465-00450000-0000Geopolitics, Vol. 10, No. 04, October 2005: pp. 0–0Geopolitics

CONTEMPORARY BORDER REALITIES

The Continuing Relevance of Borders in Contemporary Contexts

The Continuing Relevance of BordersHeather N. Nicol and Julian Minghi

HEATHER N. NICOLGeosciences Department, State University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA, USA

JULIAN MINGHIDepartment of Geography, University of South Carolina, Columbus, SC, USA

The papers in this section of Geopolitics reflect the theme of a symposiumheld in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2002.1 While not all of the authors contributingto this collection attended the conference, all the papers explore a commontheme – the continuing relevancy of borders in contemporary times. Thefact that the study of borders is a traditional one for political geographers,yet political geography as it is practiced today is not necessarily “traditional”in its subject matter, supports what Minghi has called the “transferability ofborder studies” to a new age of geopolitical thinking. Although they arecontinually being transgressed by far-reaching networks of people, capitaland cultural connections, we have yet to see national territories, boundariesand sovereignty give way to the impact of globalization. This remains thecase although the opposite scenario was predicted over than a decade ago.2

There is, instead, a growing body of emphasis upon borderlands andborder functions, and the symbolic role of border – including the increas-ingly important role of borders as “theatre”, discussed by more than one ofthe papers in this volume – has emerged as an important area of inquiry.3

But it has also become clear that although the current state of geopoliticalscholarship is much more cognizant of discursive practices, deconstructionand critical theory, the traditional or descriptive border theories andapproaches need not be jettisoned: analysis of actual borders as representa-tions of constructed political territories retains its relevancy.4 There is, it istrue, a new emphasis on the work that borders do, where borders are seenas points of reference for containing and authorizing narratives—whether

Address correspondence to Heather Nicol, Geosciences Department, State University ofWest Georgia, Carrollton, GA 30 118, USA. E-mail: hnicol@westga.edu

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these be cultural, political, economic or spatial. Part of this new emphasiscomes from the fact that borders have proven to be enduring, if not enig-matical physical and symbolic constructs which, as Megoran, Raballand andBouyjou demonstrate in this volume, are “at the skin of the state,” at thesame time that they are, literally and rhetorically “at its heart.”5

This observation is relevant because it invokes what seems to be twovery different ways of understanding borders. The first is the understanding ofborders as functional and symbolic entities which “do work” in material andimaginative ways. The second is to see borders as more subtle fields whichare perceptual, structural and discursive. In an analysis of North Americanborders, Coleman, for example, builds upon Gottman’s earlier writing,observes that boundaries “cannot be taken at face value” as coherent andconsistent entities to be studied in and of themselves. Rather, boundariesneed to be interrogated as changing, evolving, and self-contradicting entitiesand as “symptoms, effects determined by deeper [psychosomatic] causes . . .found by analysis in depth, and largely in the internal organization of the ter-ritory.”6 It is, in other words, “the social constitution of borderlands whichmerits attention, not the spaces themselves as somehow meaningful extraso-cial objects.”7 This is echoed in the contemporary work of Darby8, Coleman,9

Brunn10, Jackson11, Joenniemi and Viktorova12 and others, who continue toidentify linkages among the construction of ideas about limited spatial inclu-siveness and the rigid social and territorial borders of normative westernclaims concerning environment, society, security, democracy and economy.Much of this work is post-structural and discursive, focusing upon the rela-tionship between borders as social and political constructions, and the result-ing implications for arrays of power and spatial control.

At the same, however, there remains a growing body of literaturewhich continues to focus upon the construction and reconstruction of bor-derlands as meaningful “extrasocial” objects. The difference between thiswork and earlier writing in the field is, however, its recognition of the factthat the study of the physical manifestation of borders implies a social con-stitution, often rooted in powerful cultural, economic and political inequi-ties.13 We see this echoed in a florescence of work at the regional level,particularly in the case of western and northern Europe, where the continu-ing importance of border arrangements, and indeed their relevancy to realworld applications, provides fodder for theoretical concerns, and promotesplurality in analysis and application.14

If borders are firm, however, they are not indifferent to new pressures.While a decade ago the important question was ‘Is it a borderless world?”(the answer clearly being – no), the more pressing problem of the 21st cen-tury is itself somewhat contradictory. The problem is first, how have bordersremained constitutive to national identity in an era of transnationalism andsecond, what role have they played in the accommodation of (or resistanceto) globalization in a post-national world? Clearly an understanding of the

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682 Heather N. Nicol and Julian Minghi

relationship between borders and territorial control is more powerful whenunderstood as a mutually constitutive one, but the relationship is neithercarved in stone nor identical from place to place. Nor are borders alwaysessential to the process of identity politics, or confined to the construction ofnations and nationalism in terms of contiguous spaces. It has been arguedthat borders are a process, or series of spatial events, best understood alonga continuum of possibilities—both as a geopolitical discourse and a territorialoutcome.15 He acknowledges the difficulties of recasting borders not as lineswhich contain everywhere equal processes – i.e. the territorial definition ofnation-state – but as continuums or multitextual and multi-purposefulbounding activities. Given the changing nature of boundaries and their hier-archical and functional attributes, the measurement of boundaries requiresflexibility which takes account of their dynamic nature, rather than conceiv-ing of boundaries as static or unchanging. This approach is clear in thebroader literature of boundaries where linear definitions of borders havebeen abandoned, particularly among European countries in which devolu-tionary and transnational discourses and structures are well-advanced.

So border studies within the past decade have indicated that a very robustexplanation of the important geographical function of borders will be neces-sary in the 21st century, particularly given the watershed changes to globalorganization which occurred in the late 20th century. These challenges includenot only reconsideration of the notion of “threat” and “risk”, but reconsidera-tion of how the response to globalized environmental, political and militarythreats will be structured. In reassessing the political landscape of the late 20th

century, for example, Beck concludes that “all around the world, contempo-rary society is undergoing radical change that poses a challenge to Enlighten-ment-based modernity and opens a field where people choose new andunexpected forms of the social and political”.16 Such change has been alterna-tively theorized as ‘post-modernity17, and it stands only to reason that bordersmust to some extent satisfy, abet, or encourage these spatially defined reas-sessments. In other words, management of borders will be imbricated in thecontemporary definition of nation state or national territory, its changing geo-political rationale, and its globalizing political economy and culture. As the lat-ter change, border structure, management and definition must adjust. Theprocess is complicated, however. Although adjustment has occurred rapidly insome states – particularly those of the European Union, which has seen therecent creation of a new and diffuse political entity, in other cases it has pro-ceeded at a snail’s pace. Here borders seem to retain their importance in a tra-ditional sense, standing intact among the “old nation states”.

Or are they? More precisely, can we be certain that such borders repre-sent resilience rather than flexibility? If it is indeed the case, can we canlocate the impetus for border resilience among the forces of contemporarysociety? Is it true, as Minghi asserts, that there is a continuing importance ortransferability of traditional ideas in the contemporary geography of border-

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The Continuing Relevance of Borders 683

lands—both as the edges of organized political space and as interfacesbetween neighbouring political entities— to current borderland scenaria?Moreover, if there is a continuing relevancy for traditional approaches, howcan these approaches be recast to fit the new conceptual approaches. Canthey hope to incorporate both the theoretical, discursive and pluralizingaccounts into a more powerful body of work; work which authorizes andlegitimates the study of borders both as sites unique to national territorial-ism impulses as well as framing referents for the more general process ofmediation between local and global impulses?

In exploring this question, the collection of essays in this section ofGeopolitics cover a broad spectrum of contemporary border research, from avariety of institutional and national perspectives. The authors, while surveyingthe scene from all corners of the globe, write from the perspective of cross-disciplinary and transnational scholarship. Clearly the tie that binds is theattention each gives to the linkages between the social constitution of border-lands, the physical manifestation of border, and the convergent processeswhich have resulted in political discourses in which borders retain validityand legitimacy. As the essays suggest, there is an inherent tension betweenthe growing “contradiction” of borders, that is to say the need for “facilitative”structures and protocols to accommodate increasingly diffuse forms of spatialinteraction and the rising tide of near-hysteria among western countries con-cerning the perceived threat posed by new and increasingly globalized “risks”of terrorism, disease, biological warfare and environmental disaster. In the so-called ‘global village’ of the 21st century may become more, rather than less,important; despite—or even, because of—the risks18 associated with whathave been elsewhere by Thuathail, as “hyper-forces” of global ‘flowmations’in advanced post-industrial capitalism?19

The essays point to the relevance of exploring the continuing signifi-cance of the traditional role of borders and borderlands, that is to say thefunctional role played by borders in framing identity, discourse and nation-alism. Borders retain there importance as conduits of burgeoning transna-tional forces, just as they were previously the containers for nationalismconstructed along Westphalian nation-state ideals.

In the first essay n this section, Blanchard makes an argument for thecontinuation of a traditional focus in border scholarship. The notion thatborders are actively implicated in the construction of national discourse, ofgeopolitical narratives, and of political choices, is explored from an interna-tional studies perspective, the functional relationship between borders asphysical spaces and as institutional spaces and the structure of cross-borderconflict. Blanchard’s concern is in developing an analytical framework inwhich the meaning (“value”/“saliency”) of border can be understood as aconstitutive force in the nature of transnational relations, and where thereare clear practical benefits to be achieved from the theorization of bordersand the deconstruction of borders and bordering processes.

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684 Heather N. Nicol and Julian Minghi

In this sense, borders research requires a theoretical imperative whichincludes explanations of the process by which borders become flashpointsfor territorial conflict as well as explanations as to the role of borders in facil-itating the idea of nationalism or the momentum for cross-border flows. AsBlanchard explains, the existing literature undervalues boundaries “either byignoring or by treating sovereignty and national identity issues in a cursoryfashion”, although “many territorial conflicts…have significant sovereigntyand national identity dimensions.” Blanchard’s work links “work done” byborder as both a physical space and a social construct, to the forces of con-tradiction which promote conflict along national interfaces, and echoes thecall made by Gottman, some decades ago, for sensitivity to the fact that “[a]nelement of conflict is built into the functions of the territory, and behind themlooms a contradiction in the purposes of territorial sovereignty and of politi-cal independence: the search for security will often clash with the yearningfor broader opportunity.” Ultimately, “The former calls for relative isolation,and the latter for some degree of interdependence with the outside,” becauseborders are based upon contradiction. They are “the model compartment ofspace resulting from partitioning, diversification, and organization…endowedwith two main functions: to serve on the one hand as a shelter for securityand on the other hand as a springboard for opportunity.”20

The following three essays in this section develop the theme of rele-vancy along different lines, raising the question of how and why changeoccurs. What is the point at which structural change over space and timecoincide with the development of a new regional mentality—and a new setof functional relationships which direct the pace and direction of regionalintegration? To what extent is it possible to build up or create a regionalidentity if it doesn’t already exist?

This question is explored by Megoran, Raballand and Bouyjou, in contextof the Uzbekistani border, and in context of the larger issue of the theatrical orsymbolical and staging role played by borders in the creation of identity andnational space. It is suggested that the Uzbeki border “performs and enacts anidentity and vision of contemporary Uzbekistan,” justifying mechanisms ofsurveillance and control, and entrenching rule of the current elite.”

The question is more than academic, however, and as the recently bur-geoning literature on 20 and 21st century borderlands demonstrates, it is crucialin terms of understanding the prescriptive or applied approaches to nationalreconfiguration currently underway. It is significant, too, because it grappleswith the concept of transnationalism and supranationalism from the perspec-tive of the institutional arrangements. Megoran, Raballand and Bouyjouobserve, for example, that the interplay between the theatrical and the practicalis revealed in the study of the impact of Uzbekistan’s border crossing/customscontrol policies on both formal regional trade and the underground economy.

One of the common threads in these essays is the assumption of both thecontinuing functional and structural relevance of borders in a post-Westphalian

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The Continuing Relevance of Borders 685

world. That the post-Westphalian world has seen, by necessity, reorganiza-tion of borders and borderlands, and the emergence of a new “postmodern”world order remains the object of interrogation. This raises the question ofthe definition of postmodernity itself, and ultimately, the question of themeaning of long-standing resistance to transnationalism and “European-type” regionalism among North American Nations. Are the latter parochialwhere borders are concerned? Is this an area where “borders” are discon-nected from the geopolitical and territorial impetus towards postmodern glo-balization? The essays by Sodons, Olema and Conray and Nicol all suggest thatfirm borders among North American states are not best understood not as“holdovers” from the Westphalian world, or failures of postmodernity, but asmanifestations of the fallout from modernity itself—the “unforeseen conse-quences of functional differentiation” which “can no longer be controlled byfunctional differentiation.”21 In this sense, firm borders are merely one mani-festation of new sensibilities growing from the success of a global economy—and the increasing “risks” that such success imposes. The geopolitical dis-course of North American borders is related more to perceptions concerninglate 20th century global financial, ecological and immigration “risks” associatedwith globalization rather than to a single event such as September 11. Theywere a product of perceived reaction to larger forces including free trade andthe universal application neoliberalism, the growing corporate transnationalpresence, the growing trade in drugs and weapons of mass destruction,heightened mobility of goods and people, and a growing xenophobia as thelater brings a flood fear of the consequences of increasing interdependence.

In her essay, Nicol, places a substantial part of the failure of NorthAmerican states to develop more integrated transnational processes upon anhistorical Canadian concern with growing power and influence of the “giant”to the south. Ironically, late 20th century continentalism has failed largely forthe same reasons which made it desirable in the first place—the proximityand asymmetry of two western-style nation-states. The new security agendaof September 11 merely institutionalized the discourse of “risk politics” andelevated it to the level of a rationale for North American geopolitics—or abasis for the construction of foreign relations and policy among North Ameri-can states. The relationship at the border, however, is much more complexand historically rooted. In their paper, Sodons, Olema and Conray, argue thatthere is a pragmatic dimension of transnationalism in the US-Mexico borderregion which defies geopolitical control. The impact of September 11 uponthe US-Mexico border region has been limited in large part because of thedepth and strength of the historical and economic relationship: transnationalinteraction is constitutive of the definition of the border region itself.

Given the fact that previously, more emphasis has been placed uponcase by case study, and the “unique situations” rather than transformingnature of borderlands, it is not surprising that it has been difficult to respondto the call for cartographic representation of “new border” discourses in the

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686 Heather N. Nicol and Julian Minghi

contemporary world map. Within the broader literature several researchers,among them Blake, Thomas, Wood and Newman22 have identified thepractical and conceptual problems associated with cartographic conventionsremain so categorical, so focused on conventions associated with the bordersof old fashioned nation-states and as to capture the subtlety of the changingweight of regionalism or locale in the borderlands of the European Union.

Those concerned with “permeability,” or close to the porous borderanalogy have struggled with the problem of lines on the map. The paper byMartí-Henneberg is exceptional in this respect: It attempts to resolve thisproblem by identifying changing historical borders among European statesand groups them according to the differing nature of constitutive politicalprocesses among European states. While elsewhere, there have been attemptsto “link” geopolitical discourse to the changing dynamic of European bound-aries, the concept of why, when, and where differences develop hasremained illusive. Yet, “all European states have internal territorial divisionsthat facilitate their administration at both the regional and local levels. Insome, these administrative divisions have remained virtually unchangedthroughout contemporary history. In others both national frontiers and sub-national administrative boundaries have undergone radical changes”, andthese can be seen on the map—as changing sets of spatial organization overtime. There is clearly a plurality and flexibility to the constitutive role of bor-ders among political territories—and these reflect strategic choices as muchas historical forces.

This group of essays deonstrate that although the impulse for contra-diction may be less located in borders than in the changing and politically-defined relationship of local to global—borders are special places or inter-face where discussions, actions and power are distilled into material facadeswhich emblazon national limits—material or imaginary, hegemonic or con-sensual, sites of functional differentiation of facilitative of transnationalflows, or indeed all of the above. Not so long ago another issue of Geopoli-tics was devoted to the modern and post-modern definition of geopolitics,border processes and political territory, and in a sense, the papers in thissection revisit the same issue, using case studies to explore the viability ofmaintaining a conceptual emphasis upon borders. But this new emphasisoccurs not only under conditions of accelerating economic integration, butalso under conditions of heightened awareness of terrorism and other formsof ethno-national tensions. Such heightened sensibilities may reflect realevents, in the sense that they are based upon an imminent and empiricallydefined material threat, but more and more frequently, they may con-structed. This construction of threat, the heightened sensibility of risk, aswell as the discourses and theatrics which define these insecurities haveincreasingly sparked what has called, in this volume, the fear of “theatrical”threats, and have increasingly result in the invention and reinvention of“theatrical borders”. But it has also sparked study of the border as a unique

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and specific place which is instrumental to the definition of globalization,integration, territorialization and reterritorialization.

NOTES

1. Meeting at the Border: The Continuing Relevancy of Traditional Border Studies. Held at theSouthern Center for International Studies, and organized by the University of West Georgia, The Interna-tional Boundary Research Unit of Durham University, and the Southern Center for International Studies,Buckhead, Atlanta Georgia.

2. Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies (New York, FreePress, 1995).

3. See, for example, Denis Rumley and Julian V. Minghi, The Geography of Border Landscape”(London: Routledge, 1991); See also Paul Gangster, Alan Sweedler, James Scott and Wold Dieter Eber-wein, Borders and Border Regions in North America and Europe, San Diego State University Press andInstitute for Regional Studies of California (San Diego, California, 1997); Heather N. Nicol and IanTownsend Gault, Holding the Line, (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Forthcoming).

4. David Newman and Ansi Paasi, ‘Fences and neighbors in a post-modern world: boundary nar-ratives in political geography’. Progress in Human Geography, 22(2): pp.186–207.

5. Nick Megoran, Gaël Raballand and Jérôme Bouyjou, Performance, Representation, and theEconomics of Border Control in Uzbekistan. This volume.

6. Jean Gottmann, The Significance of Territory. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,1973), p. 143.

7. Mathew Coleman, ‘Debordering or rebordering? The US-Mexico border post September 11’,Paper presented to Meeting at the Border, Atlanta, Georgia, May 2002.

8. Simon Dalby, ‘Globalization and Global Apartheid, Boundaries and Knowledge in Post-Mod-ern Times’. Geopolitics 3 (1), pp. 132–150.

9. Mathew Coleman, Ecological Degradation and the Scarcity-Conflict Methodology, in Holding theLine, Heather Nicol and Ian Townsend Gault eds., Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005.

10. Stanley D. Brunn et. al., ‘The Geopolitics of Life and Living: Where Boundaries Still Matter, in“Holding the Line,” Heather Nicol and Ian Townsend Gault eds. (note 1).

11. Steven Jackson, ‘Technopoles and Development in a Borderless World: Boundaries Erased,Boundaries Constructed’, in Holding the Line, Heather Nicol and Ian Townsend Gault eds. (note 1).

12. See the volume edited by Pertti Joenniemi and Jevgenia Viktorova, Regional Dimension ofSecurity in Border Areas of Northern and Eastern Europe. Peipse Center for Transborder Cooperation,(Tartu, Estonia: Peipsi CTC 2001).

13. David Newman and Ansi Paasi, ‘Fences and neighbors in a post-modern world: boundary nar-ratives in political geography’ (note 2).

14. See, for example, Eberhard Bort and Neil Evans, Networking Europe, Essays on Regionalism andSocial Democracy, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000). See also, Paul Gangster, Alan Sweedler,James Scott and Wolf Dieter-Eberwein, Borders and Border Regions in Europe and North America (note 1).

15. David Newman and Ansi Paasi, ‘Fences and neighbors in a post-modern world: boundary nar-ratives in political geography’ (note 2), pp.186–207. See also Stanley Brunn et. al. “The Geopolitics ofLife and Living”, in Holding the Line, Heather Nicol and Ian Townsend Gault eds. (note 1).

16. Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). p. 1.17. David Harvey. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural

Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990).18. Ibid.19. Timothy W. Luke and Gearóid Ó Tuathail, ‘Global Flowmations, Local Fundamentalisms, and

Fast Geopolitics: “America” in an Accelerating World Order.’ In Andrew Herod, Susan Roberts, andGearóid Ó Tuathail (eds.) An Unruly World? Globalization, Governance and Geography, (eds.) (London:Routledge, 1998) pp. 72–94.

20. Jean Gottman, The Significance of T erritory, (note 3) p. 14.21. Ibid. p. 2.22. See the collection of essays in Holding the Line (note 2).

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