Holding the Line

This volume contains contributions from twenty-four scholarsconcerning the significance and implications of the world'sborderlands in economic, political, and socio-cultural contexts.Together these essays explore the changing role of borders in a globalworld. Are borders increasingly irrelevant under conditions ofglobalization, or can a case be made to demonstrate their continuingimportance at various levels of spatial activity? Situating itself within a growing border literature, Holding theLine argues that contemporary borders facilitate parallelprocesses of globalization and localization of political activity. Assuch, the essays adopt a holistic approach to understanding the impactof boundaries on both society and space. They demonstrate that anyattempt to create a methodological and conceptual framework for theunderstanding of boundaries must be concerned with the process ofbounding, rather than simply the means through which the physical linesof separation are delimited and demarcated. This approach renders thenotion of a "borderless world" highly problematic, becausethe latter ignores the important and ongoing relationship between thefunctional role of borders in the bounding process, and the symbolicrole of borders as imagined social, political, and economicconstructions embedded within a geographical text. The changing characteristics of political boundaries during an eraof globalization has become a great focus of interdisciplinary study,and this book will appeal to scholars of political geography, borderstudies, and international relations.