Boundary Making And Boundary Disputes Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Although marking and disputing territory date back to promoter tribes, the formal study of boundary making and boundary disputes came of age in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the number of sovereign states and colonial territorial possessions multiplied. With them came thousands of miles of new borders that had to be sorted out, affixed, defended, and policed. Lord Curzon—former viceroy of British colonial India, foreign minister, geographer, and explorer—reflected this urgency in a 1907 lecture in Oxford (later published as Frontiers, 1908) as he described the difficulties of affixing and policing the borders of Britain’s colonial possessions against bandits, warlords, and rival empires. He lamented that substantive understanding of how to create stable, safe borders was in short supply. More than one hundred years later, geographers, historians, and political scientists are still attempting to make sense of the dynamics of interstate boundaries.

Locating A Boundary

In its most technical form, boundary making consists of the delimitation and demarcation of a boundary. Delimitation refers to the definition of a boundary in a treaty, map, or other formal document. Improvements in survey techniques, printing, and longitude measurement in eighteenth-century Europe generated more detailed maps that proved essential for state makers wishing to craft precise boundaries between sovereign territories.

Demarcation refers to the physical marking of the boundary on the ground with signs, pyramids, posts, or fences. Engineers, diplomatic representatives, and local residents descend on the border with maps and survey tools in hand after delimitation is completed to physically mark where one state’s sovereignty ends and another’s begins. While good survey teams are essential to a proper demarcation, so too are knowledgeable locals familiar with topography and toponymy (place names). However, local populations aren’t always happy to have a new border in their vicinity and may resist state makers’ attempts to partition territory and restrict access to it. In the nineteenth century, locals along the newly delimited border between Greece and the Ottoman Empire conspired to provide the demarcation commission with false place names, with the result that clusters of villages wound up on the wrong side of the boundary.

Some borders are delimited but never complete demarcation. Many African state borders, for example, were affixed on maps and certified in treaties but have been marked only at official crossings.

While traditional approaches to boundary making focused on geographic factors and mapping techniques, subsequent approaches in political geography and political science shifted the focus to boundary maintenance—the processes and strategies states use to regulate and restrict territorial access.

Boundaries As Institutions

Before moving on to define boundary disputes, it is prudent to note exactly what the term boundary means. Boundaries— or borders—have been defined as lines of separation or legally binding divisions between modern states. Yet, boundaries are also institutions of state authority. State authorities check passports at official crossings, collect customs taxes on imported goods, police against border jumping and illegal migration, and take measures to suppress the flow of contraband. States may administer their side of a boundary unilaterally or they may pool their resources and coordinate their activities with their neighbor’s border authorities. Some states may demilitarize boundaries as military threats from neighboring states decline, while intensifying border policing against nonstate actors such as traffickers, illegal migrants, and insurgents. For example, the United States and the European Union are investing in high-technology equipment and border barriers to prevent the entry of illegal migrant workers.

Given these dynamics, border disputes have two dimensions—functional and territorial. Functional disputes arise when one state perceives that its territory and security are being adversely affected by the administration of its neighbor’s boundary. For instance, if border guards on one side neglect their duties, the entire boundary zone may attract smuggling and violent activity. Even though functional boundary disputes are relatively common, most research focuses on territorial disputes.

Territorial Disputes

Territorial disputes are defined as overlapping territorial claims by one or more states. Ongoing boundary disputes in this category include conflicting Indo-Pakistani claims over Kashmir and Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights taken from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War. Territorial disputes are by no means confined to large territories. Between 1895 and 1963, U.S. Mexican relations repeatedly soured because of the Chamizal, a disputed stretch of land along the Rio Grande barely the size of a few football fields.

The study of territorial disputes has rapidly expanded in recent years, particularly in political science. While there is no consensus on what causes or intensifies territorial disputes, a number of prominent explanations include the following variables: (1) the strategic value of territory (e.g., the British-Spanish dispute over Gibraltar); (2) resources contained by the territory (e.g., the multicountry dispute over the oil rich Spratly Islands in the Pacific); (3) long-standing historical claims (e.g., Saddam Hussein once declared Kuwait to be Iraq’s long-lost thirteenth province); (4) the correspondence between borders and ethnic-group boundaries (e.g., millions of ethnic Albanians reside near, but outside Albania’s boundaries); (5) a ruler’s likelihood of experiencing domestic backlash for the handling of a territorial dispute (e.g., Kyrgyz government officials resolved a territorial dispute with China but subsequently faced major political opposition and protest for “giving away” national territory).

Not all territorial disputes are indivisible, and some boundary disputes get resolved. In 1982, Israel handed back the Sinai to Egypt following a United States–brokered peace treaty. In the 1990s, the International Court of Justice adjudicated a long-standing dispute over the Aouzou Strip between Chad and Libya. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, China resolved border disputes with several neighboring states in order to improve the security situation in its outlying provinces.

Although boundary making and boundary disputes have conventionally been treated as separate categories, they are both contentious processes with overlapping dynamics.

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