This article was originally written on 8 October 2009 and published on blog.luxzenburg.org. It is republished here as a historical document and reflects the author’s ideas at the time of writing.
OpenDemocracy, an open-source knowledge network and think tank on international politics, publishes a compelling essay on borders by Parag Khanna. He gives a tour d’horizon of geopolitics, seen through the lens of infrastructural connections.
A fascinating picture, with many maps. It raises a question for me: what do we make of this, and what does it mean for us? Can we create a world in which we are united by lines on maps — infrastructure, trade, connection — rather than divided by other lines: borders?
Khanna’s argument is essentially that the world is increasingly defined by corridors of flow — goods, energy, people, data — and less by the sovereign territories that occupy the centre of traditional maps. Whoever controls the corridors holds power. Whoever falls outside the corridors is irrelevant.
It is a thought that fascinates me as a political geographer. The border as dividing line is, historically speaking, a relatively recent and particularly fragile concept. The infrastructure we build — motorways, pipelines, fibre-optic cables, trade routes — determines in practice more about who belongs with whom than any line on a political map.