The bordered logic behind the headlines

The bordered logic behind the headlines

‘Where do you want to go today?’ served as the tagline for software giant Microsoft’s global marketing campaign running through the mid-1990s. The accompanying advertisements were replete with flashy images of people around the world of all ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds engaging in a diverse range of activities, including business, education, video games, artistic expression, socializing, and research, to name some of the most prominent examples. The slogan ‘Where do you want to go today?’ implied that people were largely free to travel where they wished, but, of course, Microsoft was selling the power of its software to facilitate the free flow of information and communication, and by extension greater connectivity and collaboration, among people around the world, rather than the actual movement of people.

Yet combined with rapid advances in hardware and software, the tagline captured something of a popular mood of the time. Within many Western societies, the end of the Cold War, the continued liberalization of international trade and travel through a variety of supranational institutions and international agreements, and the growing clout of transnational corporations and nongovernment organizations heralded the coming of a borderless world. The prospect of unprecedented, unfettered mobility and connectivity for an ever-growing number of people seemed imminent.

Looking back thirty years later, those expectations were overly optimistic. It is impossible to deny the truly remarkable technological advances—personal computers, the internet, mobile phones, and wireless communications—that compress space and bridge territories. Yet far from a borderless world, the first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a resurgence of borders with impacts on a variety of political, socioeconomic, environmental, technological, and human rights issues.

In fact, borders have been central to two of the most significant events of the 2020s, namely the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic saw governments, with varying degrees of severity and effectiveness, impose border controls, restrict domestic and international travel, and implement systems of confinement and quarantine. These measures disrupted global supply chains and confined millions of people to their homes as their freedom to attend school, go to work, gather for worship, or even simply shop for daily essentials was restricted. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also disrupted global trade networks, while ravaging large swathes of Ukrainian territory, displacing millions of civilians, and prompting massive increases in defense spending far beyond the direct combatants.

Unfortunately, there is no shortage of international and civil conflicts roiling the international scene. The attacks by Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip into Israel in 2023 prompted Israeli retaliatory attacks and eventually a full-scale invasion into Gaza. This, in turn, gave rise to a series of broader, overlapping regional conflicts involving dozens of state and non-state combatants, including Hezbollah and Houthi militants in Lebanon and Yemen respectively and Iranian and Israeli attacks and counterattacks. That turmoil provided at least proximate triggers for the rapid collapse of the Assad regime in Syria in 2024, leaving that country divided among a mixture of forces representing a provisional government, various sectarian militias with unclear allegiances, and remnants of Islamic State forces. Syrian territory also hosts American, Russian, and Turkish armed forces, in some ways resembling the proxy conflicts of the Cold War.

While the war in Ukraine and tensions in the Middle East have dominated headlines, other armed struggles have flared and persisted across the North African, Sahel, South Asian, and Central Asian regions. Afghanistan, Congo, India, Myanmar, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, and Yemen remain gripped, at least in part, by civil strife and border disputes stretching back years, if not decades. Beyond the battlefield death and destruction, these conflicts have broader consequences, including refugee flows, economic dislocation and poverty, and malnutrition and hunger, among other problems.

Looming menacingly in the background is the specter of renewed great power competition, primarily between the United States with its global alliance system and the burgeoning partnerships between China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, as well as other like-minded authoritarian regimes. After years of forging economic interdependencies, China has been increasingly assertive in projecting power across the Indo-Pacific realm, especially regarding its claims over Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the Himalayas. The United States has responded with calls to ‘pivot to Asia’ based on targeted sanctions and a general decoupling from China’s economy, strengthening alliances stretching from East Asia through Southeast Asia and Oceania into the Indian basin, and more robust and forward military deployments across the region. Ramifications of great power conflict across the Indo-Pacific realm would greatly exceed the calamities of other ongoing wars.

This blog has summarized, admittedly in broad strokes, the shift from relative optimism in the 1990s—characterized by aspirations for a more collaborative and interconnected global community—to a world confronted by profound challenges in which borders will play central roles through the coming decades. Beyond this focus on larger-scale geopolitics and hard international power, borders are central to a variety of other issues across multiple scales, including debates about trade and tariffs, citizenship and immigration, crime, surveillance and privacy, and cultural change and human rights, to name a few. Headlines on any day offer striking examples of issues and events involving borders.

Given the salience of borders to such an array of pressing issues, Oxford University Press has launched Oxford Intersections: Borders to provide the latest border research, highlighting this field’s broad relevance. Borders are shown to be simultaneously positive and negative, often in the same place and at the same time to different people. Borders remain a prime modality of defining and enacting power across multiple scales. This collection seeks to reveal how, where, why, by whom, and to what effect that power and aspiration of territorial control is exercised. We hope readers will engage Oxford Intersections: Borders to encounter new perspectives on a topic that is elemental to human experience and foundational to the form and function of power.

Feature image by Greg Bulla on Unsplash.

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