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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 contents
List of Figures and Tables. Acknowledgements. List of Contributors.1. Geographies of Visibility and Invisibility: Strategies of Spatial Control and Differentiation. Part I: Invisible Borders of Political Control. 2. No (Wo)Man’s Land: Risking Detention along the South Ossetian Administrative Boundary Line. 3. “It’s All One Place”: Geographic Networks in a West African Borderland since Independence. 4. Transboundary Water Management in Separatist Regions: Towards a Geography of Hydro-Political Tensions. 5. Bordering the South China Sea: Maritime Claims, Contested Sovereignty, and Novel Territorialities. Part II: Invisible Borders of Socioeconomic Control. 6. Navigating Invisible Border Spaces in Switzerland: What Rejected Asylum Seekers' Lives Can Tell Us about Everyday Bordering Practices. 7. Airbnb and the Boundaries of the Tourist Center: How Peer-to-Peer Rental Platforms Have Altered the Tourist Zone in San Sebastian, Spain. 8. Losing Ground: Indigenous Territoriality and the Núcleo Agrario in Mexico. 9. Layers and Ranges of Disabling Borders: Post-Soviet Uzbekistan. 10. “Not . . . Places of High Consequence”: The Great Plains, Internal Colonization, and Pipelines in American Media Coverage. Part III: Invisible Borders of Technological Control. 11. Encrypted Geographies: Invisible Cryptographic Borders. 12. Borders in Cyberspace: The Limits to the Space of Flows. 13. Hiding in Plain Sight: The Power of Biometric Border Technologies. 14. Invisible Borders into the Twenty-First Century: Towards a Research Agenda for Invisibility.
About the author
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.
Summary
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.
