Mental Maps and Virtual Checkpoints: Struggles to Construct and Maintain State and Social Boundaries

In the period from the end of the Cold War, at the beginning of the 1990s, to the present, academics and laymen alike have moved away from a view of borders as fixed and hard features of international life. Today, borders are much more commonly understood as contingent, porous, and in flux. The Cold War, especially its last two decades, had managed to make the lines dividing countries on world maps seem to be permanent parts of the landscape, like rivers and mountains. Those years had eclipsed the memories of the dissolution of huge empires in World War I, the creation of new states and mandates after that war, and the occurrence of massive territorial changes during World War II.…