ABSTRACT

Almost fifty years have passed since ladis Kristof called for attention to theory building in border studies. But after a post-World War II fluorescence in the work of re-defining borders, geographers were turning their attention to the larger quest of building analytical approaches and theory for the entire discipline. Borders would receive limited attention except from a few specialists in political geography, political science and anthropology until the emergence of a post-modern order, and a call for “reterritorialization” of old cold War and colonial “orders” on the land became evident in the 1980s. Boundaries, borders, borderlands and other geopolitical edge concepts have emerged from loosely defined terms in the public discourse, and overdefined concepts in the traditional geographical literature, to become more precise and carefully defined elements in global analysis.2 In the late 20th century, the study of borders and borderlands grew from relative obscurity in the field of geography, to engage a widening circle of social scientists and humanists in most disciplines.3 now, after several decades of research and writing, proponents of border studies are calling again for more analytical models of how borders work, and for “theorizing borders.”4