ABSTRACT
The boundary remains a material and ideological geopolitical feature. Despite eyecatching, or perhaps more accurately “book-selling,” cries of the end of the nation-state and a borderless world, movement of goods and people (but less so ideas) is constrained by physical controls imposed by governments. Much of the geographic work on the porosity of borders and boundaries has been by European geographers looking at the internal boundaries of the EU. Alternatively, the War on Terrorism has promoted fears of “porous borders,” especially the US’s own, plus its policing of the Afghanistan-Pakistan boundary and that of Iraq. Similarly, as the boundaries of the EU are relocated eastwards, the public pressure on European government to focus attention upon refugees and other immigrants increases. In sum, the geopolitics of borders and boundaries remains, but the geography is the product of strong imposition on the one hand, and greater porosity on the other. See Donnan and Wilson (1999) for an excellent discussion of boundaries and borders, as well as the collection of essays on specific boundary conflicts in Schofield et al. (2002). In this chapter we focus on boundaries, but must note that their function is to control flow or movement. In the following chapter we concentrate on the geography of networks and the flows they facilitate.
