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Contrary to the conventional understanding of North Korean borders as classic barriers that block infiltration of outside influences, this paper argues that the Sino-North Korean border region has undergone considerable transformations, especially at the local level. By analysing local-level trans-border activities, it shows that North Korea seeks to develop the Sino-North Korean border region as a space of opportunity. Even the heightened political conflicts between China and North Korea and the tightened international sanctions against North Korea failed to dampen local actors' economic imperatives, particularly after the 2012 and 2013 decentralisations in North Korea. Local actors were active in driving trans-border economic practices and, in turn, transformed the Sino-North Korean border region into potential cross-border cooperation zones. Although there has been conflict and competition in border region development between North Korea and China, we argue that local governments and entrepreneurs' efforts to maximise economic independence in the border regions are persisting, and their geo-economic imperatives are important factors in reshaping the Sino-North Korean border region by initiating and advancing trans-border interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Border delimitations and border disputes were an important part of the early modern process of state formation and the consolidation of power. As such, they are often taken into consideration when studying political and dynastic issues, such as succession disputes, while maps are frequently studied as a form of visualisation to depict territories and borders. So far, however, neither the administrative activities involved in these processes nor the border treaties (Grenzrezesse) which constitute the most important type of source for this area of research have been studied. The aim of this paper is to examine this topic using the principality of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel as an example. This principality saw the creation and later on the expansion of administrative structures concerned with border issues from the 16th century onwards. The central aspect analysed in this paper is the process of how border disputes were settled. This was mostly achieved through border commissions. Each party involved in the conflict assigned representatives, both officials of the administrative institutions responsible for border issues (Grenzbehörden) as well as privy councillors (Geheime Räte) to serve as commissioners on these commissions. The result of their work were border treaties. These include narrationes explaining the circumstances of the conflict and of the commission, while the dispositiones comprise the articles listing the terms that had been agreed upon. Compared to administrative records pertaining to border disputes (Grenzakten), border treaties generally offer more information. This is why, when researching these phenomena, this distinctly early modern type of charter is of particular importance. It can serve as a compendium of an entire border dispute and, if there is a proper archival description, as a sort of finding aid for the record in question. This paper therefore also analyses the history of the development of this type of charter. Boundary maps, the third type of source discussed served to visualize and delineate the demarcation of borders, but seem to have been of rather minor importance at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the issue of the state border. It emphasizes the fact that the state border is a multi-component and multifunctional phenomenon. It was proved that a legally established and internationally recognized border acquires a sign of politicality. The political boundary is a holistic and dynamic phenomenon, inherent in the internal logic of development. The issues of functioning and institutional support of state borders were generalized. The influence of state borders on the development of border territories was revealed. A scheme for the development and integration of contact border areas has been developed. The factors of contact border regions development were studied, as well as the process of various types of regional socio-economic systems formation under the condition of the predominance of state border certain functions. The importance of the functioning of state borders and the development of border regions for the formation of various types of ties, the level of stability of the border and the formation of a political environment have been clarified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with a key concern in boundary studies namely what are the major forces which inform boundaries and boundary demarcation/making. Boundaries being quintessentially geographical are infused with social, political and spatial content. While the Berlin Conference imposed national boundaries using geography as a colonial tool, the principle of boundaries imposed at the intra-national scale is a current concern. The paper focusses on boundary demarcation in post-apartheid South Africa through a consideration of the Matatiele boundary dispute. Matatiele, a small town, situated towards the south-western corner of KwaZulu-Natal, but now part of the Eastern Cape Province, has been the subject of a longstanding boundary dispute between the two provinces. The matter has been a subject of a number of protracted court battles between residents of the town and the different tiers of government, the provincial and national tiers of government in particular. The paper details the struggle for spatial justice – the political strategies, in particular – of proponents for the inclusion of Matatiele into KwaZulu-Natal. The paper demonstrates that in a (quasi) federal spatial formation such as South Africa, boundaries are politically overdetermined at the national scale. The local democratic content, therefore, is rendered inconsequential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The definition of online dispute resolution (ODR) has become increasingly contested, particularly fueled by the recent explosion in the use of technology during the pandemic by courts and alternative dispute resolution practitioners. The recent expansion of stakeholders has contributed productively to the on-going discussion of the parameters of ODR that have implications for ethical practice. Does the use of video conferencing constitute ODR? What new procedural and substantive justice concerns arise with the use of technology in dispute handling and how should they be addressed? Since technology not only alters the role of third parties and disputants but also serves as a fourth party, what are the ethical implications for example, of employing artificial intelligence? How can explorations of the boundaries of ODR foster a re-imaging of 21st Century justice systems? This article explores the importance of the parameters of ODR for the ethical practice of dispute resolution and introduces a paper, Framing the Parameters of Online Dispute Resolution (National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution, 2022) that offers a descriptive ODR Framework; one that encompasses the broad range of views on the boundaries of ODR along an axis of increasing reliance on technology through various functions and stages of dispute handling. The article discusses the implications of this ODR Framework for enhancing ethical guidance and regulation for whatever definition of ODR is utilized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After her independence in 1961, the new government of Tanganyika (now called Mainland Tanzania) embarked on the establishment of new administrative units, namely regions, districts, wards, villages, and hamlets as well as establishing political and administrative boundaries. The government expected that local communities would peacefully utilize the existing resources within the respective administrative units. Contrary to that, the newly established administrative units and their respective boundaries caused conflicts in different parts of Mainland Tanzania. The reviewed literature suggests that conflicts emerged over pieces of land that separated the borders and ethnically created boundaries. Using archival sources, interviews, newspapers and documentary reviews, this paper argues that boundary conflicts between peasants and pastoralists in Kiteto District were caused by political and administrative decisions of the post-colonial government which ignored the traditional land administrative units and boundaries. The new boundaries were set up for political interests; they ignored traditional boundary settings and violated land laws and procedures during the installation of the boundary marks. The paper is thought to be significant as it contributes to the existing scholarship on border disputes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The centuries-long existence of Croatian lands in different political and geographical frameworks, as well as their bordering position between civilizational and culturally diverse and often opposing political and territorial units, have conditioned the process of very dynamic political, territorial and demographic changes that gradually shaped the borders of the modern Republic of Croatia. The area of the Croatian Danube region with the country's eastern national border to Serbia, has not been exempt from such historical and geographical dynamism. The genesis of the Croatian national border in this area is mostly recent, but its emergence in 1945 as the republic border between Croatia and Serbia within the newly established socialist Yugoslavia was indirectly conditioned by the historical and geographical processes that preceded it. With the independence of the Republic of Croatia and other republics of the former Yugoslavia, a number of open border and territorial disputes created by the change of the republic's borders to national ones occurred. The above mentioned eastern national border of Croatia is among such disputed areas. Its northern segment which is related to the stream of the Danube river became an object of Croatian territorial dispute, firstly with FR Yugoslavia and afterwards with its successor Serbia, mostly due to the opposing geographic and legal interpretations concerning borderline, and the fact that the precise delineation was not conducted during the time of socialist Yugoslavia. The actual border dispute between Croatia and Serbia in the Danube river region is contextualized in the paper through a historical and geographical analysis of the border's genesis. A review of historical and geographical facts, as well as a valorisation of both countries' views on the matter of the disputed border segments are used to reach relevant conclusions regarding the dispute in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the impact of the Rhine Crisis of 1840 on Italian countries and explains the role they played in the European State System when the Continent seemed to be on the eve of a general war. As the paper attempts to prove, the crisis seriously alarmed the ruling classes as well as the general public and revealed the internal problems of the Italian countries as well as their deep distrust towards the egotistic and self-serving policies of the Great Powers. The paper therefore introduces the history of Italy during late 1840 within the wider context of European diplomatic history and serves as a probe into the history of the European State System during the Pre-March period in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • The pattern of three functional spaces and three space conflicts are described. • An index for analyzing the intensity of space conflicts is constructed. • The moderate boundary theory is proposed based on the principle of value equilibrium. • Conflicts within moderate boundary are reserved as urban construction space. • Conflicts outside moderate boundary are reserved as production or ecological space. The multi-functionality and the finiteness of land resources collectively determine the inevitable space conflicts among urban construction space (SUC), grain production space (SGP), and ecological protection space (SEP) in planning. Moreover, the increasing urban expansion is expected to further exacerbate these conflicts. However, there is a lack of research on solving space conflicts in planning under the multi-objective. Given this, taking Xuzhou City as an example, using planning data, we analyzed the patterns of space conflicts. Then we proposed a novel method to extract the urban moderate boundary (UMB) based on the principle of value equilibrium. Finally, using UMB as the space boundary to solve the conflicts. The results show that we detected three types of space conflicts, namely construction-production conflicts (CPC), construction-ecological conflicts (CEC), and production-ecological conflicts (PEC), with an area of 17.31 km2, 14.13 km2, and 3.24 km2 of each conflicting area respectively. The land value corresponding to the UMB is 941.90 yuan / km2. The CPC and CEC within the UMB should be reserved as SUC, those outer parts of the boundary should be reserved as SGP and SEP. The PEC should be reserved as SEP according to the principle of ecological priority. After conflict resolution, the new layout of urban functional space was obtained, showing an area of 240.18 km2, 42.56 km2, and 55.35 km2 for SUC, SGP, and SEP, respectively. The new perspective and method proposed in this paper can provide a reference for urban planning and urban functional space layout optimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With reference to anthropological approaches to state borders as processes, this paper examines ‘the border’ between Pakistan and Azad Kashmir through the window of reconstruction politics after the 2005 earthquake in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Azad Kashmir. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I analyse how ‘the border’ became inscribed into politics and power relations in Muzaffarabad through a locally contested ‘reconstruction bureaucracy’ which provided Pakistan with the means to dominate reconstruction in Azad Kashmir. Activists from Muzaffarabad politicised the delay of reconstruction by addressing Pakistan's interference in Azad Kashmir's affairs. Local politicisation of reconstruction, however, revealed contradictory effects of ‘the border’ on power relations in Muzaffarabad. From the activists’ perspectives, political boundaries between Pakistan and Azad Kashmir were characterised by domination as well as cooperation that undermined local concerns such as the reconstruction of Muzaffarabad. Thus, local activists also opposed ‘their’ government and transgressed ‘the border’ into Pakistan through the creation of alliances with national actors in order to put pressure on the government of Azad Kashmir. In taking advantage of power disparities between Pakistan and Azad Kashmir, these alliances, however, not only reproduced but also undermined the nation state's domination over the region by manipulating and circumventing the ‘reconstruction bureaucracy’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is part of a more extensive research project being carried out at the Institute of Geography of the University of Buenos Aires, whose purposes are 1) to describe and analyze the South American border spaces and 2) to understand what role they play in national territory-building. A geographical description of the Argentina-Uruguay border space will be presented, using a model that considers six components: territorial dif ferentiation, frontierization, subnational territory, supranational territory, border places, and mobility. The conclusions will show the main spatial continuities and discontinuities identif ied there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a reflection on the changes and continuities in the discourse of border disputes in Latin America, within the framework of the new geopolitical order established after the end of the Cold War. After reviewing the scientific literature the paper provides an overview of the evolution of the disputes that were active around 1990 and analyzes their geopolitical discourses. The end of the Cold War does not seem to have had a significant impact on Latin American disputes, which are generally associated with the territorial nationalism promoted by certain States. Nevertheless, the consolidation of democratic regimes has entailed a change with respect to the past, and the prevailing discourse of integration has had a positive effect on those disputes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geospatial sciences play crucial roles in and have effects on the socioeconomic, political and security fortunes of states. Earth observation, remote sensing and geoscientific ground investigation increasingly occupy vantage positions in the legal order of states, particularly in evidential terms and in the verification of facts under international law. How then do these aspects of space law and space sciences affect contemporary Africa and the commercial fortunes, as well as international relations among some African states? What impact do they have in relation to: (a) international boundaries disputes and demarcation activities; (b) management and the preservation of the African heritage; (c) disaster and conservation management? The paper will test the hypothesis that it is crucial for the development of the continent especially in the areas mentioned above that states should sustain and increase investment in the following areas: archaeological prospection, condition assessment of heritage assets; Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis of spatial settlement patterns in modern landscapes and assessment of natural or human-induced threats to conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]