1st Edition
Invisible Borders in a Bordered World Power, Mobility, and Belonging
This book critically challenges the usual territorial understanding of borders by examining the often messy internal, transborder, ambiguous, and in-between spaces that co-exist with traditional borders. By considering those less visible aspects of borders, the book develops an inclusive understanding of how contemporary borders are structured and how they influence human identity, mobility, and belonging.
The introduction and conclusion provide theoretical and contextual framing, while chapters explore topics of global labor and refugees, unrecognized states, ethnic networks, cyberspace, transboundary resource conflicts, and indigenous and religious spaces that rarely register on conventional maps or commonplace understandings of territory. In the end, the volume demonstrates that, despite being "invisible" on most maps, these borders have a very real, material, and tangible presence and consequences for those people who live within, alongside, and across them.
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
1 Geographies of Visibility and Invisibility: Strategies of Spatial Control and Differentiation
Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen
Part I: Invisible Borders of Political Control
Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen
2 No (Wo)Man’s Land: Risking Detention along the South Ossetian Administrative Boundary Line
Ariel Otruba
3 "It’s All One Place": Geographic Networks in a West African Borderland since Independence
David Newman Glovsky
4 Transboundary Water Management in Separatist Regions: Towards a Geography of Hydro-Political Tensions
Mehmet Altingoz
5 Bordering the South China Sea: Maritime Claims, Contested Sovereignty, and Novel Territorialities
Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen
Part II: Invisible Borders of Socioeconomic Control
Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen
6 Navigating Invisible Border Spaces in Switzerland: What Rejected Asylum Seekers' Lives Can Tell Us about Everyday Bordering Practices
Claudia Wilopo
7 Airbnb and the Boundaries of the Tourist Center: How Peer-to-Peer Rental Platforms Have Altered the Tourist Zone in San Sebastian, Spain
Paul Begin
8 Losing Ground: Indigenous Territoriality and the Núcleo Agrario in Mexico
Peter H. Herlihy, John H. Kelly, Andrew M. Hilburn, Aida Ramos Viera, Derek A. Smith, Miguel Aguilar-Robledo, and Jerome E. Dobson
9 Layers and Ranges of Disabling Borders: Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
Mirjakhon Turdiev
10 "Not . . . Places of High Consequence": The Great Plains, Internal Colonization, and Pipelines in American Media Coverage
Christina E. Dando
Part III: Invisible Borders of Technological Control
Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen
11 Encrypted Geographies: Invisible Cryptographic Borders
Isabelle Simpson
12 Borders in Cyberspace: The Limits to the Space of Flows
Barney Warf
13 Hiding in Plain Sight: The Power of Biometric Border Technologies
Gabriel Popescu
14 Invisible Borders into the Twenty-First Century: Towards a Research Agenda for Invisibility
Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen
Index
Biography
Alexander C. Diener is a Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography and Atmospheric Science at the University of Kansas, USA.
Joshua Hagen is the Dean of the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, USA.
