Cultural Geography

generations – those conditioned by the Cold War

or those conditioned by Nokia’s utopian world

of happy communication – living in the same

territorial context (Paasi, 1996).

In this chapter we will consider the changing

and contested roles of political boundaries in the

everyday making of identities and territories.

Historical perspective helps us to understand

how boundaries have become part of the mater-

ial practices, ideologies and narratives through

which territorial groups and their identities

are constituted. The central contention of the

chapter is that boundaries are dynamic cultural

processes. They are more than ‘lines on a map’:

they have crucial links with identity, action,

mobility and power that we need to grasp if we

are to understand the changing spatialities of our

globalizing world. Boundaries are not, as tradi-

tional political geography once took them to be,

timeless, neutral lines and absolute limits of

sovereignty. They are much more complex and

interesting.

We will begin by briefly considering the con-

struction of state territoriality and boundaries.

Since geographical discourses have been crucial

in this process, the invention of a specific bound-

ary language will be traced to unpack the spatial-

ities of this language. Identity and boundaries are

typically seen as two sides of the same coin, but

often so that physical and symbolic boundaries

are regarded as exclusive constituents of identity

(Conversi, 1995; Hall, 1996). Thus the links

between state, nation and identity need to be

discussed to show how state boundaries – as

specific spatialized symbols and institutions –

become part of the practices and discourses of

daily life. The contested interpretations of the

effects of globalization on boundaries will then

be discussed, and the challenges facing boundary

studies as cultural geographies today will be

briefly considered in the conclusion.

STATES, BOUNDARIES AND

THE ‘TERRITORIAL TRAP’

Because boundaries are manufactured by human

cultures, they are political entities. Their creation

involves choices between contesting visions of

how to divide up space. They give expression to

power relations since they inevitably order and

shape the social relations of the peoples affected

by them. They involve the politics of delimi-

tation, the politics of representation, and the

politics of identity, i.e. they keep things apart one

from another, their meanings are represented in

specific ways, and they enable certain expressions

of identity while blocking others.

Although we do not always think about it, we

live our daily life in a complex network of socio-

spatial practices conditioned by the fact that the

world political map is divided into states. In spite

of centuries of human movements across the

planet and cultural mixing and hybridization, the

link between states, territoriality and sovereignty

has been so dominating that it has been almost

impossible to avoid what Agnew (1998) calls the

‘territorial trap’. This notion refers to a way of

thinking and acting that has three distinguishing

features. Firstly, modern state sovereignty,

security and political life require clearly bounded

territorial spaces. Secondly, a fundamental oppo-

sition between domestic and foreign affairs

exists. Thirdly, the territorial state acts as the

geographical ‘container’ of modern society, i.e.

boundaries of the state are the boundaries of

political and social processes. Hence, the world

is understood as consisting of bounded, exclusive

territories that have their own identity.

These assumptions look relatively simple, but

they are extremely powerful since they are

sedimented both in material practice and in ideo-

logies. Through legislation, media and the national

education system they usually become forces

through which the territoriality of the state and its

limits become taken-for-granted constituents of

social order and everyday experience (Paasi,

1996; Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996). The terri-

torial trap effectively hides the fact that collective

identities are not naturally generated but are partly

produced through the construction of various

forms of exclusion and inclusion, that is in defin-

ing who ‘we’ are, who belongs with ‘us’ and who

are to be excluded because they are ‘different’.

One significant element in the naturalization

of the territorial trap is the broadly accepted

narrative of the development of the international

system of states. This narrative assumes that the

modern state system began in sixteenth-century

Europe with the codification of a world of nomi-

nally sovereign states in the Treaty of Westphalia

in 1648. Triumphing over alternative organiza-

tions and visions of world political space, such as

a unitary world of Christendom or a world

empire dominated by an all-powerful dynasty,

the modern state system slowly evolved to

become organized around the principle of popular

‘national sovereignty’. According to the creed

of nationalism which triumphed in nineteenth-

century Europe, the world’s varied peoples were

assumed to be made up of different nations and

the most powerful and organized of these nations

controlled their own states, which they called

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