Political Borders Research Articles

Hinterlands, City Formation and Growth: Evidence from the U.S. Westward Expansion

Abstract I study how geography shaped city formation and aggregate development in the U.S. prior to the Civil War. To guide my analysis, I present a conjecture that cities’ farm hinterlands fostered both city development and aggregate growth: the hinterland hypothesis. The hinterland hypothesis has rich implications on how various elements of U.S. geography—railroads, changes in U.S. political borders, and international trade—affected city formation and U.S. growth. To evaluate the hinterland hypothesis and its implications, I assemble a novel historical dataset on population, trading routes, and agricultural productivity at a high spatial resolution. I combine the data with a dynamic quantitative model of economic geography that yields the hinterland hypothesis as a prediction. I find evidence for the hinterland hypothesis by showing that the model can replicate the key patterns of U.S. urbanization and city formation. Finally, I conduct a series of counterfactuals in the model to quantify the effect of geography on cities and growth, guided by the implications of the hinterland hypothesis. Results indicate that railroads were responsible for 1.8% of urban population in 1860 and for 25% of real GDP growth between 1830 and 1860. The effect of international trade was similar in magnitude, while the effect of political border changes was small during the period.

More-Than-Human Borders: A New Research Agenda for Posthuman Conversations in Border Studies

ABSTRACT Despite a growing interest in posthuman theory within political geography over the last two decades, the sub-disciplinary focus of critical border studies has seen a slower engagement with more-than-human entanglements. In this introductory paper to the special section, we ask whether the militarisation of borderlands, increasing surveillance of mobility, growing violence against refugees and asylum seekers, pandemic bordering, and mass displacement can be fully grasped through a singular focus upon the agency of the human subject. In addressing these questions, we challenge what we see as an anthropocentric preoccupation of existing scholarship in critical border studies and argue that the border is a constantly moving space that is created, maintained and/or dismantled by the entanglements of human and non-human lives and things. Our aim in bringing posthuman conversations into critical border studies is to explore different methods and questions that challenge binary constructions in our understandings of borders. In our response to these challenges, within this opening piece, we map three areas of debate: rethinking the heterogeneity of more-than-human borders; studying the agency of ‘things’ of the border; and finally, considering dehumanising practices of border politics. We suggest that the scholarship on more-than-human borders can be seen as a ‘minor literature’ that calls for a genuine realisation of forgotten and suppressed languages, voices, and knowledges.

Disparate Influences of the Provincial Sino-Russian Political Border on Sociocultural and Economic Borders

The resurgence of sovereign states in a highly globalized modern world calls for new approaches to border studies. The present paper suggests looking at political, sociocultural and economic borders as constructs of dynamic boundaries influencing people’s interactions. Through an oral history of a mixed Sino-Russian ethnic community, and a narrative review of smugglers and shuttle traders, this study examines how the flux of the political border between the Heilongjiang province and the Russian Far East (HLJ-RFE political border) changed the sociocultural and economic borders during three periods: the 1910s-1920s, the 1960s-1970s, and the 2000s-2010s, when the political border was characterized as being porous, hostile, and friendly, respectively. The study shows that the HLJ-RFE political border had a strong impact on limiting the sociocultural demarcation, but a much weaker effect on facilitating sociocultural interactions and economic regulations. The results of the study demonstrate how a strong and friendly political border may lose its potency when utilized by the local government to facilitate interethnic integration. Furthermore, the study warrants an interdisciplinary approach to border studies and a region-oriented methodology.

Christ's Love and Borders

AbstractThis article is a keynote address given at the Global Ecumenical Theological Institute (GETI) held in Karlsruhe, Germany, August‐September 2022, on the theme “Christ's love (re)moves borders” and organized in conjunction with the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches. The article argues that around the world, political borders are being cemented by populist nationalisms even as pandemics, capital flows, and climate change ignore them. If Christians are to resist such ideologies, they must recover a robust incarnational theology and their fundamental identity as members of the worldwide body of Christ. Simultaneously, even as borders between people are being reinforced, the border between people and machines is blurred by transhumanist and posthumanist agendas. Such paradoxes will continue to abound in an intellectual landscape where what is distinctively human is obscured by technological hubris and philosophical naïveté.

A Revolutionary Moment Founded on Forgetting: How Narratives of the UK’s Place in Europe and the World made Brexit Possible

This article examines Brexit from the perspective of the role played by multiple historical narratives about the UK and its place in Europe, as well as the wider world. Existing accounts associate the 2016 referendum result with the rise of popu⁠lism and the spread of particular anti-EU narratives grounded in Englishness, the Anglosphere and, more problematically, nostalgia about former national glories. The analysis shows that these different historical narratives served to delegitimise European integration as inimical to UK democracy and sovereignty. Equally importantly, narratives of delegitimation in turn depended on a highly selective reading of British history and convenient acts of forgetting or misremembering the role of economic or political borders. It was precisely this combination of selective historical memory and a narrative of EU oppression that created a revolutionary moment. Brexit was thus founded on multiple acts of forgetting.

Policing the Border in Lucas Pope’s Computer Game ‚Papers, Please‘

Lucas Pope’s 2013 video game ‚Papers, Please‘ places the player-character in the position of an immigration inspector in a fictional Eastern Bloc nation. Since its release, the game has garnered enthusiastic responses, being celebrated by critics as an essential dramatisation of the ethical dilemmas associated with the migratory flows and fraught border politics of the post–9/11 world. However, this essay argues that this reputation must be scrutinised: for while ‚Papers, Please‘ indeed illustrates some of the contradictions at the heart of contemporary border policy – such as immigrant- receiving states’ pragmatic application of exclusionary immigration practices that run contrary to their self-professed liberal-democratic ideals – it also engages in a ‘universalising’ abstraction of the border space, which limits its feasibility as a lens through which to view 2010s border discourses. Drawing from current research in Border Studies, a close reading of Pope’s game illustrates how its geo-historical setting and its omission of crucial phenomena associated with the twenty-first-century border, such as the interactional processes of bordering and the existence of ‘bi-cultural’ borderscapes, ultimately render it a liberal-democratic fantasy, according to which the conflicts engendered by the enforced geopolitical border are abstract questions of morality and ethics rather than practical socio-political questions. Keywords: video games; border politics; migration; rebordering

Native American Voting Rights in Utah: Federal Policy, Citizenship, and Voter Suppression

Native American Voting Rights in Utah: Federal Policy, Citizenship, and Voter Suppression

European Dreams of the Cloud: Imagining Innovation and Political Control

ABSTRACT Recently, several private and political cloud initiatives emerged in Europe. This paper demonstrates how the sociotechnical imaginaries of three European cloud projects reveal a performative coupling of innovation and political ideas of control, territoriality and sovereignty. I ascertain three elements of the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (innovation, boundary making and material properties) guiding the empirical analysis. Taking technology in the making and its role in (geo)politics seriously, this paper shows how imaginaries shape and interact with current geostrategic and political developments in Europe. The analysis of Microsoft’s cloud, Bundescloud and GAIA-X reveals that rising privacy and data security issues have been integrated into cloud imaginaries that traditionally highlight progress and innovation. More specifically, state actors and cloud providers link and sometimes merge allegedly opposing technological aspects of innovation and politicised ideas of control such as digital sovereignty. This shift constitutes a move towards erecting political borders and localising IT within a global infrastructure.

ВЗАЄМОЗВ’ЯЗОК СВІТОВОЇ ЕКОНОМІКИ ТА ПОЛІТИКИ У СУЧАСНОМУ СВІТІ: ТРАНСФОРМАЦІЯ ТА ВИКЛИКИ

The article discusses the debatable issues of the relationship between world politics and the world economy. The relationship between politics and economics in international relations at the beginning of the 21st century is realized with the help of mechanisms typical for this period. The purpose of the study is to assess the state and development trends of the world economy in view of the transformations and challenges of the modern world. The author used a set of general scientific and special methods of cognition: theoretical generalization, comparison, analysis and synthesis. The author notes that in our time such new mechanisms as the interaction of states and global economic actors have appeared. intergovernmental organizations and transnational capital, as well as relations between developed and sovereign developing states. In their interactions, they use economic means as a factor in the struggle for influence in the world, region or country. An important manifestation of this trend is qualitatively new mechanisms of the relationship between politics and economics in international relations, primarily the activities of international actors who use economic means to fight for influence in the world. In addition to political borders, economic borders also appear on the world map. All this requires scientific understanding and analytical research, because globalization, technological progress and growing international dependence create a complex landscape in which economic and political affairs cannot be considered separately. In the modern world, the relationship between the world economy and politics is becoming more and more inseparable. Political decisions and global economic challenges interact and influence each other. Understanding this relationship becomes key to the development of strategies that will contribute to sustainable economic growth, harmony in international relations, and the achievement of global stability. Only through joint efforts and dialogue between politicians and economists can optimal solutions be found to solve the most important challenges facing the modern world.

Southern territories of the Chernigov-Ryazan boundary in the XII-XV centuries

Introduction. In investigations of our science project features of historical development of the boundary territory of the South-East of the Chernigov and South-West of Ryazan lands are considered.Materials and methods. More than 450 monuments of the XI-XIV centuries are known on the territory. Among the most known archaeological objects the archaeological complex of Lavy on the Bystraya Sosna River is most important. In the late of the 11th c. this complex became the center of own rural area and the center of trade and craft activity.Results. We come to conclusion, that political borders of principalities were defined by various sources of settling of territory in the Pool of the Top Don. The analysis of the system of settlement at the microregional level allowed studying of settlements both in the system of landscape and within the settlement expanse.Conclusion. From the end of the 11th – till the middle of the 13th cc. the lands of the Right bank of the Top Don were occupied from the principality of Chernigov-Severskiy. The lands across the Don River and its Left bank were occupied from territory of the principality of Ryazan. During the second half of the 13th – 14th cc. the Right bank of the Top Don was in structure of the principalities of Verkhovskye, and its Left bank was in the structure of the principality of Ryazan. To the middle of the 12th century in Top Don the border between principalities was established passed from source of the Don River to the mouth of the Bystraya Sosna River.

The story of Karaz: A brief history of the research, and an understanding of the process of the Kura-Araxes culture in the Erzurum Highlands

The Kura-Araxean culture, which roughly characterizes the EBA period of the mountainous belt between the Taurus Mountains and the Caucasus, draws attention primarily with its geographical and chronological size. This cultural phenomenon, which has been influential in most of the Near Eastern geography for a long time, has been a subject that has been studied extensively by archaeologists and historians. Archaeological traces of this culture, which transcends today’s political borders, have been detected in the territory of almost more than ten countries. In this respect, culture has an important place in the cultural inventory and heritage of the Caucasus and related countries. Its geographical and chronological size is the source of both the richness and problems of this cultural phenomenon. These problems range from terminology to chronology. For example, in terms of terminology, culture has been called by different names in each region, depending on the regional dynamics throughout the research history of that region. A remarkable example in this regard is the name ‘Karaz’, which was given to the culture with the early researches in the Eastern Anatolian plateau, which is also the subject of this article. This article aims to tell a story of the ‘Karaz Culture’, from its emergence to its intelligibility, that is, its long journey.

ОСВЕЩЕНИЕ ВОЕННОГО КОНФЛИКТА В СМИ

Violence significance and scale assessment and conflict potential in the modern Ferghana Valley are one of the most common topics in studies of post-Soviet Central Asia. This densely popu-lated region has long been characterized as a place of hidden inter-ethnic conflict. And from this point of view, the Ferghana Valley region is not only a place of close residence of three large ethnic groups – Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tajiks, co-existing in a network of interdependent communities that share burial sites, pastures, and markets, but also a place where ethnic and political borders most often in-tersect.

MENTIONS OF THE DANUBE IN THE POETRY OF CLAUDIUS CLAUDIANUS

Claudian (Claudius Claudianus fl. 395 CE–404 CE) was a late antique poet from the Hellenised East, who rose to fame as the court poet for the western Roman emperor Honorius (393– 423). He came to Rome around 395 CE, and there he began using his talent as a classically trained poet to write panegyrics for wealthy and influential aristocrats and politicians. Claudian is considered one of the best authors of late Roman literature, even though he directed his talents toward propaganda primarily celebrating the well-known military commander Stilicho and writing invectives against Stilicho’s enemies at the court of the eastern Roman emperor Arcadius (395–408). Claudian’s poetry is one of the most valuable sources for the history of this period. In his rich poetic images, he mentions many toponyms, oronyms, and hydronyms, and his knowledge of Balkan geography seems truly enviable. One of the most frequently mentioned hydronyms in Claudian’s poetry are those referring to the river Danube, which he mentions thirty-eight times. In this paper the authors cite and analyse Claudian’s references to the Danube as a river that was a very important natural, political, and cultural border for the ancient world.

The Pang of Partition in Amitav Ghosh’s the Shadow Lines

Indian history is divided into past, present and future. The true national identity lies on the individual awareness and the nation’s heritage. The present paper is intended to examination of Amitav Ghosh treats the theme of nationalism and partition in his “The Shadow Lines” (1988) and how he describes the concept of nationalism. The continuous prompt of the nation by our ancestors has put into a questioning attitude of people recently. Ghosh views the traditional values by his animated and unendurable ideas. Amitav Ghosh has focused on the political interference in contemporary world in relation to her work “The Shadow Lines”. The political influence and violence in contemporary world are aptly marked out in this novel. The partition provided the writers with the occasion to write about the plight of the people in the subcontinent in order to bring home mainly to the western world, the impact of British rule, which had previously boasted of civilizing mission. The partition theme in Indian novels in English set the dystopian tune, which would be later on carried on to the tone of the postcolonial theories. Post-colonialism began as recognition of the dominant post-war economic and political conditions which were prevalent all over the world. Amitav Ghosh explores the ideas of nationhood and Diasporas ideas that involve relationships between individuals belonging to the same or to different communities that sometimes transgress and transcend the shadow lines of political borders. The Shadow Lines represents Ghosh’s most direct confrontation with nationalism and national identity and it is simultaneously about each character’s personal identity.

Border politics: Migrant melodramas from the Great Recession to the present

Centring on the politics of compassion in migrant films produced from the Great Recession of 2008 to the present, this article examines the affective strategies deployed by two Spanish melodramas featuring African protagonists who endure physical and psychological trauma in search of a better life. Engaging recent scholarship on global melodrama, I argue that Diamantes negros/Black Diamonds (Alcantud 2013) and Adú (Calvo 2020) look beyond European borders to identify the sociopolitical coordinates of suffering on a worldwide scale.

Förderung der deutschen Sprache durch die Auswärtige Kultur- und Bildungspolitik Deutschland: ein Triple-Win-Modell?

Abstract The article deals with the promotion of the German language abroad through Germany’s foreign cultural and educational policy. An important concern of the German intermediary organizations abroad is access to culture and education across geographic, political and social borders, but scientific and economic policy. interests, which benefit the needs of the German market, also play a major role. Regarding the fact that more and more skilled workers who are ultimately lacking in their countries of origin are migrating to Germany, the article questions whether it is always a so-called triple-win model.

Franciscanos e muçulmanos no Malabar quinhentista: dos combates pela fé à preservação da memória na cronística franciscana

The aim of this article is to analyze the relations between Franciscans and Muslims in Malabar, in the context of the political-military conflicts that characterized the end of the 16th century, more specifically during the wars between the Portuguese and a group of Muslims from that region. Based on the full trial records of the Goa Inquisition, this article initially presents a case study of Friar Antônio da Trindade, a Franciscan who crossed political and religious borders in Malabar. Then, it compares the way in which the relations between Franciscans and Muslims in 16th century Malabar were inscribed in different sources: in the inquisitorial sources, in the Jornada do Arcebispo and in 17th and 18th century Franciscan chronicles. When comparing different chronicles about the relations between Franciscans and Muslims in 16th century Malabar, references to torture and martyrdom experienced by the friars predominate as well as allusions to the challenges of preserving the memory around the struggles for faith carried out by the Franciscans in that region.

A new GTSeq resource to facilitate multijurisdictional research and management of walleye Sander vitreus.

Conservation and management professionals often work across jurisdictional boundaries to identify broad ecological patterns. These collaborations help to protect populations whose distributions span political borders. One common limitation to multijurisdictional collaboration is consistency in data recording and reporting. This limitation can impact genetic research, which relies on data about specific markers in an organism's genome. Incomplete overlap of markers between separate studies can prevent direct comparisons of results. Standardized marker panels can reduce the impact of this issue and provide a common starting place for new research. Genotyping-in-thousands (GTSeq) is one approach used to create standardized marker panels for nonmodel organisms. Here, we describe the development, optimization, and early assessments of a new GTSeq panel for use with walleye (Sander vitreus) from the Great Lakes region of North America. High genome-coverage sequencing conducted using RAD capture provided genotypes for thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). From these markers, SNP and microhaplotype markers were chosen, which were informative for genetic stock identification (GSI) and kinship analysis. The final GTSeq panel contained 500 markers, including 197 microhaplotypes and 303 SNPs. Leave-one-out GSI simulations indicated that GSI accuracy should be greater than 80% in most jurisdictions. The false-positive rates of parent-offspring and full-sibling kinship identification were found to be low. Finally, genotypes could be consistently scored among separate sequencing runs >94% of the time. Results indicate that the GTSeq panel that we developed should perform well for multijurisdictional walleye research throughout the Great Lakes region.

Trends and progress in studying butterfly migration

AbstractSeveral hundred butterfly species show some form of migratory behaviour. Here we identify how the methodologies available for studying butterfly migration have changed over time, and document geographic and taxonomic foci in the study of butterfly migration. We review publications on butterfly migration published in six languages (English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish), summarise how migration in butterflies has been studied, explore geographic and taxonomic patterns in the knowledge base, and outline key future research directions. Using English search keywords, we found only 58 studies from Asia; however, after searching in local languages, we found an additional 98 relevant studies. Overall, butterfly migration studies are mostly from North America and Europe. Most studies focus on three species: monarch (Danaus plexippus), painted lady (Vanessa cardui) and red admiral (Vanessa atalanta). About 62% of publications are focused on the monarch, with nearly 50% of migratory butterfly species mentioned in only a single paper. Several research methods have been applied to ascribe migratory status and to study the physiology, neurobiology, and ecology of migration; however, virtually all this research is on a handful of species. There remain hundreds of species for which we do not understand the comprehensive seasonal pattern of movement, flight destinations, wintering, or breeding grounds. A better understanding of movement ecology and migratory connectivity is needed to effectively conserve migratory butterflies. It is essential that research becomes more geographically and linguistically representative since migrants frequently cross political borders and international cooperation is necessary for their conservation.

The Contradictory Syrian Presence in Turkey’s Southern Borderlands

The displacement of Syrians into Turkey is approaching its twelfth year, but the conditions of Syrian presence in the country are still fraught with ambivalence. The dramatic changes in migration and border dynamics and the instrumentalization of Syrian migrants in Turkish politics have intensified racially motivated animosity. Yet in border provinces where Syrians are densely concentrated, popular attitudes toward them operate on other axes, which reveal complex entanglements of border politics, migration policies, and citizenship ideologies. This essay describes how these entanglements unfold in the country’s southernmost border province, Hatay, which was controversially annexed from French Mandate Syria in 1939.