ABSTRACT
This broader understanding is recent, perhaps overstated, and most certainly enlarged by the debates about globalization, and its impact on borders and their surrounding territory. In the 1980s no such wider understanding prevailed but geographers engaged in the study of borders and borderlands anticipated the growing importance and changes in the significance of borders, and the need to coordinate their research efforts on an international scale. At the international Symposium on Boundaries and the cultural landscape (Internationales Symposium-Grenze und Kulturlandschaft), held in Basel, october 5-8, 1981, participants resolved that the International Geographical Union establish a “commission on Boundaries, Frontiers and Borderlands.”2 The setting was appropriate for such an initiative for Basel was the center of an international region extending across the borders of France, Germany and Switzerland. This cross-border region and others being defined throughout europe, were drawing the attention of european researchers as europeans themselves were building the european Union. european Geographers were most certainly in the vanguard of border and borderlands research in 1981, but interest in cross-border regions and borderlands was emerging elsewhere, and particularly in the border zone between Mexico and the United States. on March 21, 1984, the center for InterAmerican and Border Studies at the University of Texas el Paso hosted a conference on “Problem Solving Along Borders: comparative Perspectives,” and the papers were published as Across Boundaries: Transborder Interaction in Comparative Perspective.3 european researchers led in the discussion of border regions, including the prominent example of “regio Basiliensis”, but almost half of the presentations were devoted to the United States borders with Mexico and canada. In 1985, the Association of Borderlands Scholars, based in the American Southwest, launched the Journal of Borderlands Studies to publish the growing research of borderlands
scholars devoted to the U.S.-Mexico border, and invite contributions from all continents. The study of borders, borderlands and border regions had taken shape in north America. during the next several decades, work on the canada-U.S. border would focus initially on border regions and communities, then move to broader transnational contexts, and most recently, return to a more detailed analysis of how cross-border regions and communities operate and contribute to our understanding of borderlands.
