This document discusses borders and how they shape our world. It makes several key points: 1) Borders create territories by enclosing lines on maps, but they also shape identities and knowledge. 2) Borders are not just physical boundaries but are produced through various social and political activities, organizations, and actors. 3) Borders exert a spatial power that gives order to daily life, whether they are checkpoints, walls, or transition spaces between places.

1. The lines that continue
Borders in our ‘borderless’ world
to separate us

2. “What we have come to
call a globalized world
harbours fundamental
tensions between opening
and barricading, fusion and
partition, erasure and
reinscription”
-Wendy Brown (2010)

3. What's in a line?
• Borders as territorial edges
• Borders as walls
• Borders as transition spaces
• Borders as architects of identity
formation
• Borders as institutions of
knowledge

4. Borders make
territories
• If a border is a line, a series of
closed lines create a territory.
We read maps as a series of
borderlines.
• As critical political
geographers, we will challenge
those lines, and in doing so,
what matter-of-fact position
those lines have in the way
space is made.

5. Border spaces: there are seemingly different borders at work in Israel/
Palestine, the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, and Wall Street to
organize, manage, and exclude, but they are borders nonetheless.

6. Border spaces
• Often thought of as ‘check
points’ or security apparatuses
(i.e. ‘the Green Zone’, Israel-
Palestine).
• Still more often those borders
are not policed or patrolled but
produced through a range of
activities, organizations, and
actors.
• Borders, then become a spatial
power that gives order to our
daily lives.

7. Borders as metaphor, as framing knowledge and identity:
nationalism, religion, gender