ABSTRACT

Borderlands are sites and symbols of power. Guard towers and barbed wire may be extreme examples of the markers of sovereignty which inscribe the territorial limits of states, but they are neither uncommon nor in danger of disappearing from the world scene. In Northern Ireland the relatively dormant security apparatuses on the Irish border remain, despite the rhetoric of a Europe without frontiers and the negotiations between the British and Irish states and a variety of political parties and paramilitary groups in the Northern Irish peace process. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the most famous symbol of the border between two competing world systems, heralded the end of the Cold War, the disintegration of the Soviet empire and state, and the reawakening of long quiescent nation-states, as well as the creation of some new ones in Europe and Asia.