36 books like On Borders

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

In an age when statues commemorating former colonialists and slave owners have been toppled worldwide, the figure of Winston Churchill has been left largely untouched. Myth-making around Churchill’s role in defeating Hitler is surely part of the explanation: no less than sixteen feature films have been made about his supposed historical achievements, three of them in the past decade.

As Tariq Ali points out in this informative book, “Churchill has become a highly burnished icon whose cult has long been out of control.” Yet, during the 1930s, as fascism ascended throughout continental Europe, Churchill was a fanboy of the far-right. Like many of his social class, Churchill admired fascism for its capacity to keep communism in check. Until 1937, his “support for Mussolini was effusive, his hopes for Franco outlasted the war, and, for some years, he was impressed by Hitler and the sturdy, patriotic Hitler youth.” “Imperialism,” Ali argues,… show more.

This book uses seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century piracy as one of its case studies to make innovative arguments about global history. Through a discussion of piracy, Benton seeks to transform our understanding of the significance of oceanic space. Though empires might assert control over territories and their inhabitants, in fact, their jurisdiction, or sovereignty, was uneven – thinner in some places than others, and only realized in fits and starts.

For Benton, the spatial figure of the corridor as a conduit for law and jurisdiction is vital to understanding the geography and movement of early modern imperial power. Inconsistencies in the application of prize law, the regulation of privateering, and the prosecution of piracy graphically show the unevenness of sovereignty at sea and the ways by which all types of mariner attempted to mark out jurisdictional corridors as they traversed the world's waters.

Bill Hayton’s book helped guide me into this theme of the significant value and importance of the South China Sea. He offered a comprehensive historical narrative of the region from ancient times to the early 2010s while scrupulously outlining the territorial disputes and power struggles it has fostered.

His use of academic sources and journalistic articles was most readable. As a journalist, I welcomed his non-wonkish writing style and digressions on key actors in the unfolding dramas playing out in real-time on the ocean. I also met the author at several South China Sea conferences, and his open style and manner reflected in person were also present in his narrative. 

I like Borders and Freedom because Scholz shows a different way of interpreting political borders and territories.

Most people would think that toll stations would be located at the boundary between states. But Scholz illustrates how they were actually located well within the borders of political territories because channeling movement was far more important than maintaining fixed boundaries.

As a young reporter in the mid-1990s, I cut my teeth reporting the end of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ and the eventual signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement peace deal. That deal was based around a constitutional ambiguity that was rocked by the Brexit vote.

This pithy volume by Queen's University Belfast politics professor Katy Hayward manages to blend absolute concision and with ambition, tracing the history of the Irish border that found itself at the heart of the UK’s often bitter Brexit negotiations with Europe.

Amid so much rhetoric, Hayward trades only in the facts while carefully framing the future choices that Brexit might bring to Northern Ireland.

My first point of concern is the fact that ideas and concepts are historical products altered in time.

In his book, Professor Andrén provides a historical context for the ideas of Europe and their sources that have emerged over the last two centuries. He neatly shows the historicity of the thoughts as constructs linked to the regional and global conditions of their time.

He highlights the visions of Europe in the 19th century marked by revolutions and unifications; in the first half of the 20th century, marked by wars and crises. He then examines the visions in the second half of the century characterized by the search for peace and prosperity, European integration and a pan-European identity.

Let us navigate from Andrén's point of view that ideas about Europe did not die out, but evolved into more current constructs in modern European history.