Beyond my fascination with borders as historical sites of conflict and shifting markers of control, I’ve spent an academic career studying the simultaneity of barrier and juncture. This research has led me to witness licit and illicit border crossings, refugee camps, commercial ports, smuggling, and conservation through cloistering. In my travels, I’ve perceived my vulnerability at certain borders and ease of passage at others. All of this afforded me insights into the human division and demarcation of space and resulted in books and articles on varied facets of bordering in the hope that I might contribute to inhibiting the bad and facilitating the good where territories meet.
I found this book eminently readable. It’s like a story about borders, offering vivid portrayals of real conflictual political geographies. Dodds makes clear that borders play political, social, economic, and environmental roles that must be considered for any prospect of peace in the future.
This is the sort of book that educated readers, from college students to international jet setters, would find enlightening as to borders’ breadth of relevance in the 21st Century.
A thrilling insight into international geopolitics by one of the world’s leading experts, examining the past, future, and present meaning of borders from the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11, Palestine to Pakistan, North Korea to Trump’s Wall, and beyond
What do the world’s best-known, most dangerous, and most unexpected border conflicts mean for our changing international relationships?
In The New Border Wars, border expert Klaus Dodds journeys into the geopolitical clashes of tomorrow in an eye-opening tour of border walls―literal and figurative―from the Gaza Strip to the space race. In the Himalayas, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere, the tension…
I was drawn to this book for its depth of thought and critical perspective on bordering as a process. Paulina Ochoa Espejo covers the rich ground of political geography, mixing philosophical considerations of human place-making and how borders are integral to that process.
I returned to various chapters of this book whilst writing about other topics and regions. The book pulls readers from their comfortable perspectives and compels both fruitful and necessary reconsiderations of borders.
When are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn?
Today people think of borders as an island's shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly, this Desert Island Model of territorial politics forces us to choose. If we want territories, then we can either have democratic legitimacy, or inclusion of different civic identities--but not both. The…
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
I could have recommended several books by this author. Still, his 2023 offering is particularly pertinent to borders in the 21st century as it demonstrates that we exist in both a world of flows and a bounded, territorial system. Though this may seem contradictory, this book demonstrates how territoriality and barrier-bordering dynamics have always been but one aspect of international relations.
That which crosses borders and elides controls of the nation-state system plays powerfully into the very politics, economics, environments, and daily lives occurring within it. To understand borders as filters and barriers is the only way to apprehend the geopolitics of the 21st century.
Geopolitics is not dead, but nor does it involve the same old logic of a world determined by physical geography in a competition between Great Powers. Hidden Geopolitics recaptures the term to explore how the geography of power works both globally and nationally to structure and govern the workings of the global political economy. Globalization, far from its antithesis, is tightly wound up in the assumptions and practices of geopolitics, relating to the scope of regulatory authority, state sponsorship, and the political power of businesses to operate worldwide. Agnew shows how this "hidden" geopolitics and globalization have been vitally connected.…
I’m drawn to this book for shaking the tree. The environment is commonly depicted as a global cause. This book explains how self-interest and varied forms of disparity framed by an infrastructure of borders impede efforts to mediate the negative impacts of human activity.
Rather, oxymoronically, territorial interests inhibit human capacity to extract from extant patterns and practices that harm the natural systems upon which we rely. This book shows the role of borders on environmental issues and the planetary impact of the nation-state system. This is not a screed or a sermon but a well-reasoned consideration of how the political geographies affect the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink.
With the new geological age known as the Anthropocene heralding dramatic disruptions in the earth system, geopolitics needs to be fundamentally reconsidered to deal with these new circumstances. Planetary boundaries and ecological change are now the key contextualization for considering future global political arrangements.
We now find ourselves in a new geological age: the Anthropocene. The climate is changing and species are disappearing at a rate not seen since Earth's major extinctions. The rapid, large-scale changes caused by fossil-fuel powered globalization increasingly threaten societies in new, unforeseen ways. But most security policies continue to be built on notions that look…
This book is a spy novel with a satirical edge which will take you on a heart-pumping journey through the streets, mountains, jungles, and beaches of Colombia. Our Man in Havana meets A Clear and Present Danger.
While somewhat of a departure from my prior favorites in scope, I love this book because it is a deep dive into a specific stretch of border in 21st-century Central Asia. Though most may be unfamiliar with the myriad complexities at the juncture of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Nick Megoran’s ethnographic treatment offers a window into how borders in the 21st century are lived with and through.
This is because changing a border’s porosity alters the routes, businesses, educational opportunities, and relationships of people on both sides and beyond. Megoran’s book puts you on that border and compels you to think about how the decisions made in capital cities radically affect the citizens at the margins of state territories.
Nick Megoran explores the process of building independent nation-states in post-Soviet Central Asia through the lens of the disputed border territory between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In his rich "biography" of the boundary, he employs a combination of political, cultural, historical, ethnographic, and geographic frames to shed new light on nation-building process in this volatile and geopolitically significant region. Megoran draws on twenty years of extensive research in the borderlands via interviews, observations, participation, and newspaper analysis. He considers the problems of nationalist discourse versus local vernacular, elite struggles versus borderland solidarities, boundary delimitation versus everyday experience, border control versus resistance,…
Perhaps more prevalently than ever in history, the 21st century hosts transnational flows of people, resources, commerce, and ideas. But borders still matter. The task before us is to create “good borders” that protect those peoples, places, and things requiring protection, filter and block the nefarious, connect in positive and productive ways, and define and differentiate while allowing human potential to be fully self-realized.
My book offers a historical perspective on bordering before guiding readers through considerations of topics such as transnationalism, security, migration, indigeneity, environmental sustainability, maritime and outer space bordering, and neo-liberal economics. It ultimately asks if borders “should” exist in their current form or might somehow evolve in the 21st century.
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
