Bending Borders and Emerging Transnational Spaces

Like wars, nationalist aspirations, and the natural rerouting of great rivers, globalization changes the world’s borders by bending and stretching them out of shape and thus creating new transnational spaces. State borders, which on maps define political boundaries, no longer draw the line in people’s lives they once did. Often, borders are still where states interdict goods, people, and information, legal or otherwise, but they are just as importantly where trade— including the exit and entrance of people, together with their skills and knowledge—is most intense. During times of war, even desolate borders, if not successfully closed, grow hyperactive with the swapping of goods, human beings, intelligence, and creeds. Borders continue to contain self-described national populations and self-described national activity, but the resurgence of myriad ethnic groups and regional cultures is pushing and stretching their limits. New power centers with their own identities are springing out of once politically trivial landscapes. Smaller, peripheral cities and towns near newly active borders are growing into important and prosperous centers.Title VI National Resource Center Grant (P015A030066