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Salzburg Global Fellow David Newman discusses the renewed importance of border studies as an academic discipline that challenges the notion of a “borderless world”

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This op-ed was written by David Newman, who attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program "Beyond the Nation-State? Borders, Boundaries, and the Future of Democratic Pluralism" from September 19 to 23, 2023.

Border studies has undergone a significant renaissance during the past three to four decades.  From a dormant subdiscipline within the wider field of geopolitics and political geography, it now encompasses a broad disciplinary perspective, covering most of the social sciences and some of the humanities and liberal arts. It has become, as an appropriate metaphor, a truly cross-boundary discipline reaching well beyond its limited origins within the fields of international relations and political science. 

The growth of this area of study is indicated by several factors. There are now many international conferences, workshops, and seminars; there are also both academic and practitioner organizations, such as the Association of Borderland Scholars (ABS), Border Regions in Transition (BRIT), Borders in Globalization (BIG), African Border Scholars (ABORNE), and the Association of European Border Regions (AEBR). Large research projects include FP7 EUBorderScapes, funded by the EU, and Borders in Globalization (BIG), funded by the Canadian Government. Additionally, there are countless publications of monographs, for example in the Routledge series on borders, and scientific papers in the Journal of Borderland Studies, Political Geography, and Geopolitics, along with a growing number of research students working on border-related topics.

One of the main reasons for this renaissance was the rejection of the notion of “borderless worlds” which became prominent as part of the globalization discourses of the 1980s and 1990s, as though borders were opening up to the extent that they were disappearing altogether. This discourse was compounded by the historical and political contingencies of an ever-expanding European Union without internal frontiers and the collapse of the Iron Curtain and all the hard physical borders that went along with it. The combination of the two processes - the technological and the political contingency - created a borderless mantra that was becoming politically and socially acceptable. 

However, scholars and practitioners from around the world indicated that what was really happening at that time was that while some borders may have been opening up and less rigid than in the past, they were certainly not disappearing altogether. The world and society continued to be ordered through borders (“borders create order”), regardless of whether they were physical like walls and fences, or invisible, or whether they were geographical-spatial borders between countries within the international system or a multiplicity of other borders which were vertical, social, and cultural. This thus expanded the understanding of border dynamics at a variety of social and spatial levels, as contrasted with the limited understanding of the borderline as a fixed unmoving entity and a static outcome of the political process with no dynamics of its own.

The culmination of the borderless world ideas was the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ten years after that event, the world held seminars and workshops to commemorate it and discuss the disappearance of such barriers from the international system. Another ten years afterward, and in the post-9/11 era, questions were being raised as to whether the removal of physical borders was, in all cases, necessarily a good thing. Yet another ten years later, most conferences were devoted to the return of borders, walls, and fences, partly as a response to the new threats of terrorism and global violence, but also as part of the desire by governments to prevent the unlimited migration of millions of people escaping persecution, or simply seeking better lives in the more affluent societies and countries of the Western world - a theme which is today one of the most prominent in the field of border studies.

That does not mean to say that borders have returned to where they were 30 to 40 years ago. Technology has changed and borders are no longer able to prevent the dissemination of information or global capital, or for that matter to entirely prevent the mass movement of people intent on overcoming all obstacles in their path. What we are interested in today is much less the physical demarcation and delimitation of the border, as contrasted with the dynamics of the bordering process focusing on power relations and how different types of borders are managed and controlled, enabling or forbidding access and cross-border movement. The physical location of the borders is not always at the territorial edge of the state, as they may be in airports or in computerized surveillance centers in the national capitals (such as the unit in Washington, DC which can see any movement across the vast expanse of the US-Mexico border), but they are there all the same.  

What countries have to deal with today is not how to close or open borders but how to manage both processes at the same time, given the global nature of international interactions and flows, not just of peoples but also of global capital, dissemination of information, and the growing number of people with multiple identities and citizenships. These are the challenges facing the decision-makers of tomorrow, as we put the idealized notion of borderless worlds behind us and face reality.

Professor David Newman holds the Research Chair in Geopolitics at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. He is a noted border scholar, was chief editor of the international journal, Geopolitics, from 1999-2014, and recently hosted the Third World Conference of the Association of Borderland Studies (ABS) in the triple cross-border location of Eilat (Israel), Aqaba (Jordan) and Taba (Egypt).

David attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program "Beyond the Nation-State? Borders, Boundaries, and the Future of Democratic Pluralism" from September 19 to 23, 2023. The 2023 Salzburg Global American Studies Program focused on the contestations and renegotiations of boundaries beyond the nation-state, and how they are changing the representation of democratic pluralism.