Holding the Line: Borders in a Global World

This volume contains contributions from twenty-four scholars concerning the significance and implications of the world’s borderlands in economic, political, and socio-cultural contexts. Together these essays explore the changing role of borders in a global world. Are borders increasingly irrelevant under conditions of globalization, or can a case be made to demonstrate their continuing importance at various levels of spatial activity?

Situating itself within a growing border literature, Holding the Line argues that contemporary borders facilitate parallel processes of globalization and localization of political activity. As such, the essays adopt a holistic approach to understanding the impact of boundaries on both society and space. They demonstrate that any attempt to create a methodological and conceptual framework for the understanding of boundaries must be concerned with the process of bounding, rather than simply the means through which the physical lines of separation are delimited and demarcated. This approach renders the notion of a "borderless world" highly problematic, because the latter ignores the important and ongoing relationship between the functional role of borders in the bounding process, and the symbolic role of borders as imagined social, political, and economic constructions embedded within a geographical text.

The changing characteristics of political boundaries during an era of globalization has become a great focus of interdisciplinary study, and this book will appeal to scholars of political geography, border studies, and international relations.

Heather N. Nicol is assistant professor of geography at the State University of West Georgia. Ian Townsend-Gault is associate professor of law and director, Southeast Asian Legal Studies at the University of British Columbia.