Function of Political Boundaries
Political boundaries serve several functions, including defining the extent of a country's sovereignty, regulating the movement of people and goods, and delineating administrative divisions. They also help to establish and maintain order, security, and control within a territory. Additionally, political boundaries can influence cultural, economic, and social interactions between different regions and nations.
4 Key excerpts on "Function of Political Boundaries"
eBook - ePub- Gideon Biger(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...These pressures sometimes cause the line to change. These changes take place in the landscape, and are documented in the chronicles of history. Every border is formed as a result of an equilibrium of forces between different states in a certain time. The positioning and characteristics of the border are set according to the power and according to the ideologies of the forming participants. These viewpoints come into practice during the political and military negotiations. The siting and marking of a border reflect the technological and cartographic knowledge, and the governing arrangements alongside it are a product of the views of the states situated on both sides. When the geographer Friedrich Ratzel compared the state to a living organism, he simulated the border to the skin of the living, political body. 1 Like any skin of a living body, it functions both as a protective layer and as the site through which the exchange with the outer world occurs. According to Ratzel’s idea, one cannot separate the discussion about the border from the discussion about the rest of the state. The border is actually the reflection of the state’s power, and its own existence influences this power. Other geographers have added to this image, and claimed that, like human skin, the border can have its own disease and its condition can reflect the general situation of the body. Even though this romantic view has been rejected as old-fashioned, the statement that fixates the bond between the nature of the boundary, and the nature of the state, is firm and abiding. The essence of political boundaries International political boundaries are borderlines that were determined through political negotiations between sovereign states. These lines express the spatial range of the political authorities that exist on both sides of the border. A borderline appears on the map as a thin line, devoid of a spatial dimension that separates the areas of the states residing on its two sides...
eBook - ePubGlobal Politics
A New Introduction
- Jenny Edkins, Maja Zehfuss, Jenny Edkins, Maja Zehfuss(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Space is viewed as being subdivided into components whose boundaries are ‘objectively’ determined through the mathematical and astronomically based techniques of surveying and cartography. (Soja 1971: 9) One of the key techniques is in the practice of actually making boundaries, and the process of taking this from the map to the land. In political geography there is usually a three-stage process of boundary making outlined Allocation, which sets the general shape, making use of straight lines, coordinates of latitude/longitude, and depiction on a map. Delimitation, which involves the selection of specific boundary sites on the ground. Demarcation, where the boundary is marked by pillars, cleared vistas, fences, etc. (Jones 1945). Box 11.5 Geometric Territorial Division Examples of these kinds of geometric territorial division include The western boundary between the USA and Canada, which runs along the 49th parallel of latitude. Compare this to the eastern boundary between the states, established much earlier between colonial possessions of the British. The surveying of the Mason–Dixon line in the 1760s, which was to settle a boundary dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania when they were both British colonies. The line runs at approximately 39° 43¢ 20¢¢. The rectangular land survey of the lands of the United States west of the Mississippi in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leading to the geometric shape of many of the western states...
eBook - ePubPolicing Mobility Regimes
Frontex and the Production of the European Borderscape
- Giuseppe Campesi(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 2 The geopolitics of EU borders DOI: 10.4324/9780429291548-2 In the previous chapter, I looked at borders mainly in terms of their relationship with security. The aim of this chapter is to describe the evolution and main features of the contemporary European Union (EU) border regime. Thus, as I take up the thread of my reasoning on borders, I will slightly change perspective and look at borders essentially in terms of their relationship with territory. I believe that the best way to decipher the political dynamic that led to the emergence of a new border regime in Europe is to start by exploring the complex redefinition of the European political space that the EU political integration process has entailed. This process has, I believe, explicitly challenged our traditional geopolitical understanding of borders. As Foucault pointed out in a series of interviews on the relationship between space and power published in 1976 in the journal Hérodote, ‘territory’ is by no means a purely geographical concept. It is primarily a political-juridical concept, which refers to the idea that power and control are exercised over a certain portion of space (Foucault 1976). Territory is the word used to refer to ‘a particular and historically limited set of practices and ideas about the relation between place and power’ (Elden 2013 : 7). In its current meaning, the concept is closely linked with that of sovereignty and therefore with the exercise of an exclusive power within a given portion of space. It is the modern state that has produced the notion of territory, giving space a specific political substance (Paasi 2007). The process of producing territory has entailed action in two different dimensions...
eBook - ePubGoverning Mobility Beyond the State
Centre, Periphery and the EU's External Borders
- A. Müller(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...Where such restrictions occur within the territory, ‘we can reliably expect to find an authoritarian state (or worse)’ (Torpey, 1998, p. 243). Therefore, the territorial borders are the central site where the state’s sovereignty over movement becomes visible. Thus, territoriality and the accessory phenomenon of the border are essential features of modern authority. Consequently, also the institutionalized linkage between mobility, territory and state authority are fundamental prerequisites for the modern understanding of borders. Functional concepts of the border Among the contemporarily influential approaches for studying borders, a common notion is shared, namely analysing borders from the perspective of the functions they provide for the nation state. Although not always explicit, borders are perceived as providing two different though not exclusive functions: borders are assumed to provide protection from cross-border threats, as it is implicitly assumed in the sociology of risk society and of globalization, or borders are explicitly identified with migration control, as it is assumed by William Walters, advocates of securitization studies, such as Didier Bigo, and neo-Marxist Etienne Balibar. Globalization, risk society, and the devolution of borders The understanding of sociology as the study of national societies has been deeply jarred by the expansion of cross-border processes and by their increased visibility (Vobruba, 1998). The sociology of globalization and the risk society reflected these increasing transnational interdependencies and departed from an understanding of distinct societies which were more or less strictly isolated from each other. Environmental processes as well as the increase in global financial investment were regarded as sociologically relevant factors that originated from one place but affected life at distant locations. Equally important, these connections were not only recognized by academic observers but by a larger public...
