The relevance of borders today: the technical unification and political compartmentalization of territories

Abstract

The text explores the ideology of the “end of political borders,” which emerged at the start of the 1980s, seeking to distinguish the border as a zone from the border as a line, based on that classically formulated by geography. Based on this indication, it discusses the general forms of division of political territories that emerged with the territorial State: the reflection revolves around one of the concretions of geographic space, the territorial category. The analysis is based on the discussion of the insertion of Brazilian territory in the world of globalization, registering that the technical unification of the world does not necessary mean its political union. Empirically, the text ascertains that the bigger the technical unification of the world, the larger its compartmentalization with relevance to international borders.