ABSTRACT
The evolution of Frontiers is perhaps an art rather than a science, so plastic and malleable are its forms and manifestations. Lord Curzon of Kedleston, Frontiers: The Romanes Lectures. The changing role of the United States in the world economy also transformed some of its relationships with its southern neighbour, Mexico, changes which had important consequences for their mutual border regions and people. The full effects of postimperialism and post-colonialism were becoming evident to a new generation of Asians and Africans, some of whom were the first to be bom in their recently independent nation-states. Political geography has been the sub-field which has been most associated with border studies since just before and after the First World War, when geographers attempted to understand why and where state boundaries were drawn, and to describe and classify these borders in such terms as good, bad, artificial and natural.
