Geography
Types of Borders
Borders can be categorized into several types, including natural, artificial, geometric, and cultural borders. Natural borders are formed by physical features such as rivers and mountains, while artificial borders are established by humans through treaties or agreements. Geometric borders are straight lines, often based on latitude or longitude, and cultural borders are defined by differences in language, religion, or ethnicity.
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8 Key excerpts on "Types of Borders"
eBook - PDFHuman Geography
People, Place, and Culture
- Erin H. Fouberg, Alexander B. Nash, Alexander B. Murphy, Harm J. de Blij(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
All of these examples, and many more, reveal the need to study borders beyond just the geopolitical divisions. Geographers today, working in boundary and border studies, recognize that borders are never natural. They are always socially constructed; they are products of social practice, historical context, and are often the result of conflict. When borders and boundaries are first and foremost un- derstood as social practices, it is possible to question not just their geopolitical history, but the dynamic processes that create, maintain, and shift them. We can consider the cultural dimen- sions of borders, including the unique borderlands that emerge around territorial borders, and pose questions about such things as the relationship between borders and the construction of identity; the meaning of borders as both joiners and dividers between spaces; and the complex processes of inclusion and FIGURE 3.13 Taking down the Berlin Wall, 1989. FIGURE 3.14 Vehicles make their way through U.S. inspections at the Paso del Norte Port of Entry. The Paso del Norte International Bridge connects El Paso, Texas, with Juarez, Mexico. A Mexican teenage boy was shot and killed by U.S. border security in 2010, causing an international outcry about the strict measures the United States uses to control the entry of illegal immigrants at this busy border crossing. Boundaries Physical or imaginary lines of contact between states, including the social institutions and symbols that exist in social practices and discourses. Borders Adjacent areas lining boundaries. Borderlands Transition zones within which a boundary (line) is located. Frontier Political divisions between states or divisions between settled and uninhab- ited areas within a state. Nation A tightly knit group of people possessing bonds of language, ethnicity, religion, and other shared cultural attributes. Such homogeneity actually prevails within very few states. Bobbie DeHerrera/Getty Images © Gerard Malie/AFP/Getty Images
eBook - PDFVisualizing Human Geography
At Home in a Diverse World
- Alyson L. Greiner(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Boundaries Every state consists of a defined territory marked by at least one boundary. We tend to think of boundaries as lines that stretch boundary A vertical plane, usually represented as a line on a map, that fixes the territory of a state. 182 CHAPTER 7 Political Geographies such as the high-altitude zones along the Andes Moun- tains between Chile and Argentina. All political boundaries are human creations, but they often make use of physical features. A physiographic bound- ary follows a natural feature, such as a river or mountain range. For example, the boundary between Bulgaria and Romania follows the Danube River for much of its length. In mountainous areas, physiographic boundaries usually follow the crest, the line connecting the highest points. When a river is used, the boundary may be placed along one bank, in the middle of the river, or along the deepest part of the river channel. One problem with using rivers as boundaries is the potential for a river to substantially shift its course (Figure 7.6). Geometric boundaries are drawn as straight lines and sometimes follow lines of latitude or longitude. As we have discussed, the concentration of geometric boundaries in Africa stems from the Berlin Conference. West of the Great Lakes, the boundary between the United States and Can- ada follows the 49th parallel, and the straight line between Alaska and the Yukon Territory follows the 141st meridian. horizontally through space—the way we see them on maps—but boundaries are better understood as having a vertical extent, dividing the airspace above the ground and the rocks and resources below ground. The bound- aries of coastal states extend offshore. The waters en- closed by these boundaries are considered part of the territory of the state and are called territorial seas. By international convention, territorial seas rarely exceed 19 km (12 mi).
- Matt Duckham, Michael F. Goodchild, Michael Worboys, Matt Duckham, Michael F. Goodchild, Michael Worboys(Authors)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- CRC Press(Publisher)
More subtle are the long term On the ontological status of geographical boundaries 171 effects that may arise from the simple existence of the boundary, regardless of how it is physically demarcated. An international boundary drawn across an initially homogeneous region may lead in time to the two subregions thereby separated acquiring marked differences in character. Prescott (1965) cites a detailed study by Daveau of the effects of the Swiss-French boundary in the Jura to the west of Lake Neuchâtel over several centuries, where, for example, the ‘small strip fields’ of Amont in France are clearly contrasted with the ‘summer pastures’ of Carroz in Switzerland, ‘even though the physical character of the landscape on both sides is the same’ (Prescott, 1965, p. 97). This is a case where the physical effect of a boundary is something directly visible, but in many cases the effect is more subtle, having to do with patterns of movement and interaction. A political boundary introduces discontinuities into such patterns, some of which may be obvious, others only to be uncovered by detailed research. Fielding (1974), for example, notes that ‘[p]eople in Vancouver…are more likely to marry partners from Toronto or Winnipeg than from Seattle, Tacoma, or Bellingham, despite the proximity of single people in the latter group.’ Such differences in patterns of interaction are epiphenomenal. One could, albeit rather artificially, consider a field whose value at a given point is the probability that a randomly-chosen single inhabitant of Vancouver will marry a person living at that point. Then the state of affairs described by Fielding would show up as a heteroline marking a discontinuity in the field values along the border. 4 SOME KEY ATTRIBUTES OF BOUNDARIES In the light of the foregoing discussion it should be evident that the world of geographical boundaries is highly diverse, encompassing physical, biological, psychological, social, and political phenomena.
eBook - PDF- Joseph P. Stoltman(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
As regional geography became dominant in the first half of the 20th century, scholars focused their energy on cata- loguing and classifying different types of boundaries (Hartshorne, 1936). The study of political geography and geopolitics became a backwater with only a few scholars sustaining the field in the 1950s and 1960s after the work of some political geographers, who applied the Darwinian theory of natural selection to races and states, was used by Nazi Germany to justify expansionary state policies during World War II (Minghi, 1963). In the 1970s and 1980s, as the stigma of Nazism faded, the field of political geogra- phy began to reemerge, often through research employing a world systems perspective (Taylor, 1982). Scholars using this approach studied borders by analyzing the role they play in organizing the global economy and the sovereign state system. The 1990s saw a rapid growth in the study of borders as postmodern and poststructural critiques of knowledge destabilized the notion that boundaries were fixed and finalized. Instead, scholars emphasized how dis- courses and practices create, reiterate, and contest notions of fixity (Newman & Paasi, 1998). Simultaneously, the global context changed as the cold war ended and the pro- cess of globalization appeared to be connecting the world economically and culturally. The object of study in politi- cal geography expanded greatly during this period to include the symbolic connections between cultural bound- aries and political borders, the uneven changes brought by the process of globalization, and the political and social construction of borders (R. Jones, 2009b; Newman, 2006). These boundary narratives ofthe 21st century are analyzed in depth later in the chapter, but first it is important to understand the coevolution of sovereign states and national boundaries in the modem era. Boundaries and Sovereign States Building a wall to keep someone out (or in) is not a new phenomenon.
eBook - PDFMediated Bordering
Eurosur, the Refugee Boat, and the Construction of an External EU Border
- Sabrina Ellebrecht(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- transcript Verlag(Publisher)
Thinking and Researching Political Borders | 71 countering of substantialistic take on borders, the territorial border maintains an explanatory status. In fact, it seems that the territorial border even trips the spa-tial turn and globalization theories. By providing data on cross-border move-ment, for instance, territorial borders paradoxically function as an indicator and a place of measurement for the space of flows. Concepts of exclusion, fixity, and the topographical imagination of surface, which have been critically assessed in the works of the spatial turn, are reinserted into border studies through the type “territorial border” (Elden 2010a: 801; Painter 2010). Moreover, together with the spatial turn and its deessentializing and denatu-ralizing impetus, there is a general unease among social scientists when taking the borders grounding or material presence into account. At times, researchers appear afraid of buying into a substantialistic take on borders. For instance, the Italian scholar Paolo Cuttitta, rejects the distinction between territorial and social borders, argued for by David Miller and Sohail Hashmi (Miller/Hashmi 2001) stating that their distinction was misleading, since it would suggest that territorial borders were not socially produced. However, what Cuttitta rejects is neither the concept of territorial border nor of social borders. He finds fault with the alleged-ly misleading contrasting juxtaposition, as he apprehends a conclusion by analo-gy between territory and an essentialist conception of borders. In his own works, however, Cuttitta finds that the strength of territoriality from which the border profited as a means to define and secure a socio-political entity, is now penetrat-ing social, political and legal practices globally (Cuttitta 2006: 38, 2007).
eBook - PDFEuropean Regions and Boundaries
A Conceptual History
- Diana Mishkova, Balázs Trencsényi, Diana Mishkova, Balázs Trencsényi(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Berghahn Books(Publisher)
As far as political geography is concerned, regions are important as politi-cal constructs, as arenas of political engagement, and as terrains of the projec-tion of power. Regional identities are mobilized at different scales and provide Political Geography and Geopolitics 259 matter for the perception, performance, and representation of politics. Still, political geographers have studied one scale much more than others: that of the (sovereign national) state. The territory of modern nation-states has been the object of much of the analysis of the classic works in political geography, covering issues as diverse as state borders, capital cities, administrative and electoral geographies, and international relations. The state territory is seen as such a specific region that the term “region” has generally been used in political geography to label regions other than the state, either subnational regions (i.e., regions inside the territory of the state) or supranational regions (i.e., regions as groupings of states). In this contribution, we want to engage with the latter types of regions and discuss how Europe has been subdivided in regions in political geography and geopolitics. We emphasize explicit re-gionalization—that is, studies in which delineating regions was a central goal—as opposed to implicit regionalization, in which assumptions about re-gions are made in the context of other research goals. Geopolitics can be considered a subfield of political geography. Originally it was primarily concerned with the impact of physical geographical features, such as topography, orography, climate, and vegetation, on power politics (i.e., relations between the most powerful states) and closely connected to the imperialist and nationalist practices of statehood of the first half of the twen-tieth century.
eBook - PDF- John A. Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, Gerard Toal, John A. Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, Gerard Toal(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Geographers do not have a monopoly over the defin-ition of just what is a boundary, just as non-geographers cannot understand the boundary phenomenon without recourse to the spatial and territorial dimensions of this dynamic. In order for boundaries to be understood more fully, it requires, in the 134 DAVID NEWMAN first place, for boundary scholars to undertake their own form of trans-boundary movement into the disciplines and concepts of the other, those others who have traditionally been excluded from the exclusive boundary discourse practiced by the separate and different academic disciplines. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ackleson, J. 1999. Metaphors and community on the US-Mexican border: Identity, exclusion, inclusion and ``Operation Hold the Line''. Geopolitics , 4(2), 155±79. Albert, M. 1998. On boundaries, territory and postmodernity. Geopolitics , 3(1), 53±68. Blake, G. H. 1999. Geographers and international boundaries. Boundary and Security Bul-letin , 7(4), 55±62. Blake, G. H. 2000. State limits in the early 21st century: observations on form and function. Geopolitics , 5(1), 1±18. Blake, G. H. 2000. Borderlands under stress: some global perspectives. In M. Pratt and J. Brown (eds.) Borderlands Under Stress . London: Kluwer Law International, 1±16. Boggs, S. 1940. International Boundaries: A Study of Boundary Functions . New York: Columbia University Press. Brunn, S. 1998. A Treaty of Silicon for the Treaty of Westphalia? New territorial dimensions of modern statehood. Geopolitics , 3(1), 106±31. Dittgen, H. 2000. The end of the nation state? Borders in an age of globalization. In M. Pratt and J. Brown (eds.) Borderlands Under Stress . London: Kluwer Law International, 49±68. Eskelinen, H., Liikanene, I., and Oksa, J. (eds.). 1999. Curtains of Iron and Gold: Recon-structing Borders and Scales of Interaction . Aldershot: Ashgate Press. Falah, G. and Newman, D. 1995. The spatial manifestation of threat: Israelis and Palestinians seek a ``good border''.
eBook - PDF- H. Pınar Şenoğuz(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
1 Exploring community and change from border perspective Traditionally, border studies have adopted a view from the center; we argue for a view from the periphery … Rather than focusing on the rhetoric and intentions of central governments, we look at the social realities provoked by them. (Baud and van Schendel, 1997, p. 212) The recent revival of studies on borders and boundaries has largely been influ -enced from the impact of globalization and proliferated in the academia with the concomitant questions of identity, culture, and space. A multi-disciplinary realm drawing on history, anthropology, sociology, political science, and geography today characterizes border studies. The erosion of the Cold War divide between the West and the Eastern Bloc with the collapse of the former Soviet Union and communist regimes at the turn of the 1990s and the accelerating globalization fostered interdisciplinary perspectives and ethnographic standpoints in border research (Paasi, 2011, p. 17). These processes and their analyses have contrib -uted to the conflation of territorial and conceptual borders, the question of ter -ritorial sovereignty and identities, and cultural unity and difference within the same framework (Kolossov, 2005). The theories of globalization particularly stirred among the border scholars a critical geographical thinking and new spatial consciousness. This book recognizes the valuable contribution of border studies in analyzing social stratification and change. In this chapter, I will review the scholarly literature on border studies with a critical eye towards delineating the main threads and con -ceptions of border as “peripheral” areas. A ‘cultural turn’ in border studies, which challenged the conventional notions of identity, culture, and territory, has ques -tioned studies on border on the grounds that they reproduced the state-centric per -spective with their classical themes such as cross-border cooperation and regional economic integration.
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