Borders: A Very Short Introduction

Borders: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Alexander C. Diener
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199912653
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Compelling and accessible, this Very Short Introduction challenges the perception of borders as passive lines on a map, revealing them instead to be integral forces in the economic, social, political, and environmental processes that shape our lives. Highlighting the historical development and continued relevance of borders, Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen offer a powerful counterpoint to the idea of an imminent borderless world, underscoring the impact borders have on a range of issues, such as economic development, inter- and intra-state conflict, global terrorism, migration, nationalism, international law, environmental sustainability, and natural resource management. Diener and Hagen demonstrate how and why borders have been, are currently, and will undoubtedly remain hot topics across the social sciences and in the global headlines for years to come. This compact volume will appeal to a broad, interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students, including geographers, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, international relations and law experts, as well as lay readers interested in understanding current events.

Borders: A Very Short Introduction

Borders: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Alexander C. Diener
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199912653
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Get Book Here

Book Description
Compelling and accessible, this Very Short Introduction challenges the perception of borders as passive lines on a map, revealing them instead to be integral forces in the economic, social, political, and environmental processes that shape our lives. Highlighting the historical development and continued relevance of borders, Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen offer a powerful counterpoint to the idea of an imminent borderless world, underscoring the impact borders have on a range of issues, such as economic development, inter- and intra-state conflict, global terrorism, migration, nationalism, international law, environmental sustainability, and natural resource management. Diener and Hagen demonstrate how and why borders have been, are currently, and will undoubtedly remain hot topics across the social sciences and in the global headlines for years to come. This compact volume will appeal to a broad, interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students, including geographers, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, international relations and law experts, as well as lay readers interested in understanding current events.

Once Within Borders

Once Within Borders PDF Author: Charles S. Maier
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674973917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Throughout history, human societies have been organized preeminently as territories—politically bounded regions whose borders define the jurisdiction of laws and the movement of peoples. At a time when the technologies of globalization are eroding barriers to communication, transportation, and trade, Once Within Borders explores the fitful evolution of territorial organization as a worldwide practice of human societies. Master historian Charles S. Maier tracks the epochal changes that have defined territories over five centuries and draws attention to ideas and technologies that contribute to territoriality’s remarkable resilience. Territorial boundaries transform geography into history by providing a framework for organizing political and economic life. But properties of territory—their meanings and applications—have changed considerably across space and time. In the West, modern territoriality developed in tandem with ideas of sovereignty in the seventeenth century. Sovereign rulers took steps to fortify their borders, map and privatize the land, and centralize their sway over the populations and resources within their domain. The arrival of railroads and the telegraph enabled territorial expansion at home and abroad as well as the extension of control over large spaces. By the late nineteenth century, the extent of a nation’s territory had become an index of its power, with overseas colonial possessions augmenting prestige and wealth and redefining territoriality. Turning to the geopolitical crises of the twentieth century, Maier pays close attention to our present moment, asking in what ways modern nations and economies still live within borders and to what degree our societies have moved toward a post-territiorial world.

A Nation Without Borders

A Nation Without Borders PDF Author: Steven Hahn
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735221200
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 610

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Book Description
A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian’s "breathtakingly original" (Junot Diaz) reinterpretation of the eight decades surrounding the Civil War. "Capatious [and] buzzing with ideas." --The Boston Globe Volume 3 in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner In this ambitious story of American imperial conquest and capitalist development, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Steven Hahn takes on the conventional histories of the nineteenth century and offers a perspective that promises to be as enduring as it is controversial. It begins and ends in Mexico and, throughout, is internationalist in orientation. It challenges the political narrative of “sectionalism,” emphasizing the national footing of slavery and the struggle between the northeast and Mississippi Valley for continental supremacy. It places the Civil War in the context of many domestic rebellions against state authority, including those of Native Americans. It fully incorporates the trans-Mississippi west, suggesting the importance of the Pacific to the imperial vision of political leaders and of the west as a proving ground for later imperial projects overseas. It reconfigures the history of capitalism, insisting on the centrality of state formation and slave emancipation to its consolidation. And it identifies a sweeping era of “reconstructions” in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that simultaneously laid the foundations for corporate liberalism and social democracy. The era from 1830 to 1910 witnessed massive transformations in how people lived, worked, thought about themselves, and struggled to thrive. It also witnessed the birth of economic and political institutions that still shape our world. From an agricultural society with a weak central government, the United States became an urban and industrial society in which government assumed a greater and greater role in the framing of social and economic life. As the book ends, the United States, now a global economic and political power, encounters massive warfare between imperial powers in Europe and a massive revolution on its southern border―the remarkable Mexican Revolution―which together brought the nineteenth century to a close while marking the important themes of the twentieth.

On Borders

On Borders PDF Author: Paulina Ochoa Espejo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190074213
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
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 resulting politics creates mass xenophobia, migrant-bashing, hoarding of natural resources, and border walls. To escape all this, On Borders presents an alternative model. Drawing on an intellectual tradition concerned with how land and climate shape institutions, it argues that we should not see territories as pieces of property owned by identity groups. Instead, we should see them as watersheds: as interconnected systems where institutions, people, the biota, and the land together create overlapping civic duties and relations, what the book calls place-specific duties. This Watershed Model argues that borders are justified when they allow us to fulfill those duties; that border-control rights spring from internationally-agreed conventions--not from internal legitimacy; that borders should be governed cooperatively by the neighboring states and the states system; and that border redrawing should be done with environmental conservation in mind. The book explores how this model undoes the exclusionary politics of desert islands.

Lands of Lost Borders

Lands of Lost Borders PDF Author: Kate Harris
Publisher: Knopf Canada
ISBN: 034581679X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE RBC TAYLOR PRIZE WINNER OF THE EDNA STAEBLER AWARD FOR CREATIVE NON-FICTION "Every day on a bike trip is like the one before--but it is also completely different, or perhaps you are different, woken up in new ways by the mile." As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved--that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and philosopher--had gone extinct. From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan and their like had long ago mapped the whole earth. So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars. To pass the time before she could launch into outer space, Kate set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule, then settled down to study at Oxford and MIT. Eventually the truth dawned on her: an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. And Harris had soared most fully out of bounds right here on Earth, travelling a bygone trading route on her bicycle. So she quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Mel, this time determined to bike it from the beginning to end. Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer before her, Kate Harris offers a travel narrative at once exuberant and meditative, wry and rapturous. Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped.

Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity

Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity PDF Author: David Newman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135263418
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Contributions to this collection seek to determine the extent to which states and boundaries have, in fact, disappeared, or are simply changing their functions as we move from an era of fixed territories into a post-Westphalian territorial system. A group of international political geographers and political scientists examine the changing nature of the state, pointing to significant changes on the one hand, but equally noting the continued importance of territory and boundaries in determining the political ordering of the post-modern world.

Territories Without Boundaries

Territories Without Boundaries PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description


Borders, Legal Spaces and Territories in Contemporary International Law

Borders, Legal Spaces and Territories in Contemporary International Law PDF Author: Tommaso Natoli
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030209296
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This book examines the challenges posed to contemporary international law by the shifting role of the border, which has recently re-emerged as a central issue in international relations. It posits that borders do not merely correspond to States’ boundaries: indeed, while remaining a fundamental tool for asserting States’ power, they are in fact a collection of constantly changing spatial limits. Consequently, the book approaches borders as context-specific limits and revisits notions traditionally linked to them (jurisdiction, sovereignty, responsibility, individual rights), while also adopting the innovative approach of viewing borders as phenomena of both closedness and openness. Accordingly, the first part of the book addresses what happens “within” borders, investigating the root causes of the emergence of spatial limits and re-assessing apparent extra-territorial assertions of State power. In turn, the second part not only explores typical borderless spaces, but also more generally considers the exercise of States’ and international organisations’ powers and prerogatives across or “beyond” borders.

Terror and Territory

Terror and Territory PDF Author: Stuart Elden
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816654832
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Today's global politics demands a new look at the concept of territory. From so-called deterritorialized terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda to U.S.-led overthrows of existing regimes in the Middle East, the relationship between territory and sovereignty is under siege. Unfolding an updated understanding of the concept of territory, Stuart Elden shows how the contemporary "war on terror" is part of a widespread challenge to the connection between the state and its territory. Although the importance of territory has been disputed under globalization, territorial relations have not come to an abrupt end. Rather, Elden argues, the territory/sovereignty relation is being reconfigured. Traditional geopolitical analysis is transformed into a critical device for interrogating hegemonic geopolitics after the Cold War, and is employed in the service of reconsidering discourses of danger that include "failed states," disconnection, and terrorist networks. Looking anew at the "war on terror"; the development and application of U.S. policy; the construction and demonization of rogue states; events in Lebanon, Somalia, and Pakistan; and the wars continuing in Afghanistan and Iraq, Terror and Territory demonstrates how a critical geographical analysis, informed by political theory and history, can offer an urgently needed perspective on world events.

Karst without Boundaries

Karst without Boundaries PDF Author: Zoran Stevanovic
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1498787738
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Karstified rocks of different lithology cover more than 10% of the continental surface of our planet. It is known that some 20% or even a few percent more of the global population largely depends on karstic groundwater but in many karst areas all over the world there are limited natural resources including absence of drinking waters. The problems o