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As a social institution, a border simultaneously divides and connects. When thinking about state borders, or borderlands, scholars tend to view them as either linear or zonal spaces, distinguishing as well as linking one state with another. My article argues for an alternative interpretation and explores the geopolitical and cultural meanings of a historical border region from both domestic and inter-state perspectives. The border of China and Korea along the Yalu and the Tumen Rivers, is arguably one of the oldest state boundaries that is still effective today. The history of the border river region as a "buffer space" can be traced back to the seventeenth century when Qing China and Chosŏn Korea established the border along their northern frontiers. However, the geopolitical function of this border went beyond considerations of defence or communications. From the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, both the Manchu-Qing court and the Chosŏn court implemented strict laws to control domestic population flows to their northeastern and northern frontiers. Such policies, I argue, must be understood in the context of domestic politics in the two courts. Internal anxiety over preserving Manchu and Korean identity, coupled with strategy to control the border against an external power, contributed to the making of this borderland. Hence, the Qing-Chosŏn border region served as a "dual buffer". Employing historical records and local gazettes in the two countries, my article reveals a subtler layer of "buffer" from a case study in early modern East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research has concentrated on border guards and the politics of bodies, but less attention has been made to the interaction between embodied differentials and women's varied household income classes and its consequent effect, such as a dichotomy in gendered control over women's mobility. This study established such a perspective by following the continuation of the application of the body as an analytical scale in scholarships of feminist political geography and taking the heterogeneous women's voices into account. The analysis shed light on the gendered forms of domination implied by the entangled protection and control paradigms in framing the practices of patrolling the border. Thus, in this article, the author unpacked how incorporating the entwined paradigms of protection and control into the framing of border guarding manifests differential gendered implications, ranging from fear of making mobility-related decisions to immobilisation patterns. It connects these practices to gendered processes of othering, highlighting the interaction between embodied differentials and the various economic positions of women and thus finds a dichotomy in gendered control over mobility in the name of border protection under the guise of border patrolling practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the end of the cold war order post-Soviet borders have been characterised by geopolitical tensions and divergent imaginations of desirable political and spatial orders. Drawing upon ethnographic research in two border towns at the Russian-Estonian border, the article makes a case for a grounded examination of these border dynamics that takes into account how borders as sites of ‘mobility and enclosure’ are negotiated in everyday life and shaped by the differentiated incorporations of statecraft into people's lives. Depending on their historical memories, people interpret the border either as a barrier to previously free movement or as a security device and engage in correspondingly different relations to the state—privileging local concerns for mobility or adopting the state's concerns over security and sovereignty. Analysing these border negotiations and the relations between citizens and the state, articulated in people's expectations and claims, can provide us with a better understanding of how people participate in the making of borders and contribute to the stability and malleability of political orders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The border is a place of encounter for geopolitical and literary accounts as well as historiographical and anthropological ones, but also is, like the doors guarded by the god Janus, a location where the dichotomy between control and integration--the paradox of globalization-- is apparent. All this may allow an informal measurement of relations between neighbors. This article will discuss the implementation, over 30 years, of border controls at the Chilean-Bolivian frontier through the deployment of one of the most aggressive policies seen in teichopolitics: mine-laying that resulted in a virtual wall between both countries. F inally, the reasons that led Chile in recent years to remove mines and reduce its control of the border will be analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an attempt to give an answer to the question: what are the consequences of the weakening factor of territorial belonging and how it in fact realizes in the Lithuanian-Polish-Belarusian borderland? In such a small territory as Lithuanian-Polish-Belarusian borderland it is possible to investigate two opposite, reciprocal processes: disappearances (the Lithuanian-Polish borderland) and strengthening of borders (the Lithuanian-Belarusian and Polish-Belarusian borderland). Borders as markers of division have different functions. Using a "boundary narrative" we will analyse such functions as "border-door", "borderwall", and "barrier". A method of a free narration about a life on border will allow to create the generalized image of the inhabitant of a border zone, its way of life and to reveal its peculiar features. These peculiar features we will analyse in the case of Lithuanian-Polish-Belarusian borderland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]