The nature of international boundaries

Abstract

Border scholars reject the concept of “natural boundaries” in relation to territorial divides, insisting that their locations are products of human artifice. A side effect of such analyses is that scholars have infrequently explored nature in relation to the making of boundaries, particularly international ones. In the last 20 years or so, however, many have considered the co-production of nature (broadly construed) and society in the form of nation-state territorial divides. The resulting literature focuses mostly on nature's effective enrollment in the policing of national boundaries and migration or on the policing infrastructure's environmental impacts, while largely reproducing nature and society as distinct. Focusing mainly on the U.S.−Mexico borderlands, this paper enriches the portion of that literature that blurs the divide between nature and society by doing two things: (1) championing greater consideration of international boundaries as products, producers, and containers of a differentiated “nature” of a socio-natural sort; and (2) advocating a political ecology of international borders centered on the (re)production of global inequality. In so doing, the article demonstrates how international boundaries help regulate and shape access to global space, leading to unequal environmental resource consumption, the uneven allocation of environmental benefits and detriments, and disparate livelihoods.