KLAUS DODDS | INTERVIEW
A recently published book, Border Wars, by this British professor of geopolitics gave Carl Marsh much to ponder. His subsequent talk with Klaus Dodds will hopefully prod your grey matter too. Read on…
Your book kept me awake at night, with my brain kicking into hyperdrive in disbelief, not knowing so much about what the contents of the book inform around border wars. This must be some of the feedback you hoped for by having written this book?
Yes. Thank you. I did write this book with the sort of reader in mind who is not only interested in border disputes – sometimes people have a considerable personal and professional investment in a specific border, like Ireland, Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan – but a direct experience of how quickly borders can be made and felt.
The pandemic and the lockdowns that followed have revealed, perhaps for the first time for many, how borders can work domestically and externally. As we discovered in the UK, devolved government means that each Kingdom element developed its own lockdown measures, including tier system and movement restrictions. Internationally, national governments imposed their own border controls, which varied in severity. In turn, this caused border tension as neighbouring countries accused one another of using public health as an ‘excuse’ to suppress some rather than others’ unwanted mobility. Even neighbours with a previously good relationship, such as the US and Canada, discovered that attitudes could harden if one side considers the other to be a COVID-risk – in August 2020, the BBC reported that Canadians wanted more severe restrictions placed on US visitors. As the book argues, viral borders have revealed some troubling aspects of how our geopolitical world works.
On a more micro scale, people covet their property and land – 10 acres of fields or 10 feet of patio space – and it often leads to conflict, or legal proceedings. This has been going on for millennia, and is indoctrinated in the young by our families and schooling. I can’t see any slowdown in all this, can you?
Human beings are quite capable of being tribal and territorial. But that does not mean that this is inevitable. After all, human history is full of civilisations that had different attitudes towards movement, property ownership and the organisation of authority. Indigenous communities have, in many cases, tended to think of land and natural environments as something that they share with others, including plants, animals, and essential resources such as water.
If we think of private property and nation-states with distinct territorial borders, then our human history is more recent and certainly not millennial. Borders of the sort I deal with in Border Wars are the product of recent human history – the last 300 years in the main – and became more numerous in scope and range as empires crumbled. New states emerged in Africa, Asia and Latin America in the early 19th century. So many of our contemporary border wars have their genesis in the messiness of imperial dissolution and the work of European and North American surveyors, mapmakers and administrators drawing lines on a map and establishing physical barriers on landscapes such as mountains, riverbanks, deserts and plateaus.
What we have witnessed is an acceleration in border-making – some of which is now taking place on the seabed or remote polar environments, alongside speculative commentaries that one day we might end up dividing the moon and outer space into national zones and commercial areas of interest. We don’t seem to be able to give up bordering.
I presume that by writing this book, you hope it might find an audience which could effect a change?
What would be useful is if people reading Border Wars came away with a strong sense of how much we border and why bordering continues to be a source of conflict in so many areas of the world. Borders are also blunt instruments – they might be suitable as crude public health measures, and they have been used to build a sense of national identity. When Americans pledge their allegiance to the flag in schools, they do so in a context where they learn how big their country is. In Argentina, every schoolchild learns at an early age that the Falkland Islands belongs to the Argentine Republic and learns to draw the two main islands’ outline. So borders are an essential element in what has been termed in the past ‘patriotic education’.
But, as I argue in the book, we need to recognise that climate change and pandemics are indifferent to borders. Borders can be shut, but ultimately, even New Zealand will discover that they need the world to be vaccinated if they want to remove their strict border restrictions. And as communities living on low-lying islands such as the Maldives recognise, the border between land and sea is fundamental. Sea level rise is going to imperil islands and cities around the world. Millions and millions of people will, in all likelihood, find themselves displaced. All of this means that our sense of borders is inviolable and is going to be sorely challenged. Building ‘beautiful walls’ is not going to save anyone.
A few weeks ago, a dam in India collapsed due to a glacier falling. This brings it home about how fragile the world is yet also how powerful the elements are against artificial structures.
We face a climate emergency, an ecological-civilisational crisis, and living with a pandemic that will make itself felt for years. For the last 30 years, communities around the world drunk the globalisation Kool-Aid. In the early 1990s, there was this naïve optimism that globalisation had triumphed, and everyone would turn to capitalism and liberal democracy; borders would be open, and travel around the world would be impervious to environmental and political restraints. There was even talk of the internet being used to hold authoritarian governments to account. For a short time, no one wanted to be reminded of Cold War walls and barriers.
The 2000s shattered that rosy vision. We discovered that climate change did not mean gentle ‘change’ but carried non-linear disruption and aggressive feedback loops involving extreme weather. The Arctic is the ground zero for rapid and unrelenting environmental decomposition – it is warming, melting, thawing and burning, and the implications that follow are truly global.
The 9/11 attacks provided a horrific reminder of the commercial airplane as a symbol of international terrorism rather than global travel; successive financial, migratory, and disease-related emergencies have revealed a dark side to human mobility, resource exploitation and consumerism. With the world population expected to reach 10 billion, we will have to have candid discussions about what kind of global order will help us adjust to life on earth that is going to become more challenging.
When dams collapse, wildfires break out, and communities get flooded, we are reminded that our presence on earth is not within our sovereign control. Part of our challenge is to unlearn the very things that have contributed to this stark bordering between nature and humans. And that is going to be hard – it will require humility at the same need to recognise that our political systems are struggling to get beyond stark dichotomies such as friend and enemy.
The detail you go into in Border Wars is most welcome, such as where you mention the thalweg principle: for the uninitiated, why is this term so important? And why don’t all countries agree on such findings?
Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to make things complex and use our learning to devise rules and understandings designed to divide up the world into discreet areas. Take the thalweg principle. In physical geography, thalweg is used to demarcate the deepest part of a watercourse, such as a riverbed. Being a highly dynamic physical feature, any line you draw on a river to mark it up will be squiggly. When it comes to determining ownership of a shared river, the thalweg principle refers to the legal principle used to divide a watercourse between parties.
But nothing is straightforward. It is all very well devising norms, rules, and procedures to divide up rivers, islands, and lakes, but problems quickly mount when those physical features change. India and Bangladesh found themselves in a dispute about river deltas and alluvial islands. Satellite images can be used by one party to show that the border has moved, and that things that were thought to belong to one party now ought to belong to the other. In river systems with high outflow and sediment load levels, the scale and pace of change could mean that a border line shifts by metres rather than mere centimetres.
Some countries have sought to engineer physical geography artificially. River dredging and island reclamation are favoured techniques designed to consolidate a country’s grip on what they consider their territory. Countries do come to blows over watery borders, and might not care for legal remedies and mediation: a few years ago, China ignored an international ruling in favour of the Philippines regarding artificial island-building in the South China Sea.
You’ve catered for everybody with this book: those of us that think we know it all, and those who’d more readily admit they don’t.
I hope it will appeal to any reader curious about why countries worry about borders, and how and where we face crises over borders. While many of us in the UK might be frustrated while dreaming of a summer holiday, the grim reality for many communities worldwide is that borders can be a source of near-constant tension and violence. But crossing borders can also mean a matter of life and death for so many people fleeing persecution and violence. There are good reasons why so many people seek to leave Central America and head northwards towards the US border. Mobility injustice is a huge issue for millions around the world.
The book has three especially current, even futuristic chapters: ‘Smart Borders’, ‘Out Of This World’ and ‘Viral Borders’. For me, these turned all of the previous chapters’ border war stuff on its head. The evidence around viruses, satellites and space exploration, let alone smart borders, could get very messy for the whole planet. There is no stopping conflict, is there?
I am not a pessimist despite my focus on borders and conflict! Borders can and do save lives, but we need to have a more open conversation about what kind of world we think we will share as the climate emergency intensifies. While we must start to decarbonise, we need to be alive to certain realities. The earth’s capacity to absorb further pollution and resource exploitation is much reduced from what it was before industrialisation commenced in the 18th century.
We have transformed the human condition but at an ecological cost. We have created a political system that divides the earth into national territories and international zones such as oceans and Antarctica. We use our technologies to travel and explore; discover and exploit; and settle in places such as Antarctica that are not naturally supportive of human communities. And we carry with us our ideas about borders into new arenas such as space. We will need to think of ourselves as a global humanity rather than a series of communities divided up into 200-odd states and territories.
Questions of inequality, justice and mobility will demand ever more attention from us all. Young people today, I think, grasp the scale and pace of the challenges involved. I am hopeful that the ‘Greta generation’ will make itself heard and insist upon new ecological-civilisational models. Borders are part of the problem and could be part of the solution if used flexibly and justly.
It must have taken you a long time to research this book and then write it, as some of the content is relatively recent. Still, I know with borders that there are issues every day around the world, so that you could be writing this every day for a decade and never run out of material? Until tomorrow, when a new problem arises around borders!
Two years, but the book’s research owes its origins to a long-running column I wrote for Geographical Magazine. There was so much to work with, and part of the challenge was to keep the book to nine substantive chapters with strong themes rather than produce a long list of border disputes that I think would be overwhelming. I wanted to show that we have ways of making sense of these disputes. Once we understand better why, where and how we border ourselves and the earth, we might be in a better position to reimagine alternatives to the border and bordering.
Border Wars is published by Ebury, price: £20. Info: here
words CARL MARSH