Borders Border Orientation in a Globalizing World

Borders are an increasingly salient component of national and international politics. States have historically fought bloody battles to establish their authority over space; for this reason, territorial conflicts are commonly cited as one of the most important causes of war. Recently, however, states’ authoritative peacetime border displays have become increasingly controversial. Globalization of markets and intensified human mobility increasingly challenge political authority and raise questions of cultural identity. Possibly in response to intensifying global pressures, some states employ highly visible strategies of territorial legitimation by asserting their control over physical space. In some cases, border control has become a central policy lever in response to a range of perceived external state and nonstate threats.

Scholars have few organizing conceptual frameworks to systematize the study of territorial authority in the modern era. The most advanced research program centers on territorial claims, where states compete over border location. The continued pursuit of this research agenda is vital to our understanding of territorial politics but leaves aside many salient issues that persist even when a border is settled. We propose a paradigm-shifting focus to the question of governance along international borders. Making this shift requires an organizing conceptual framework for ascribing meaning to expressions of state authority at the border. We therefore introduce a new concept we label border orientation, which taps the state’s commitment to the public, authoritative, and spatial display of its capacities to control the terms of penetration of its national borders, often in response to perceived vulnerabilities to external “threats” from state and non-state forces.

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