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This chapter examines concept of international boundaries. It considers the character and modus operandi of international boundaries, how these are determined and changed, and the justification for the current practice of endorsing inherited and existing borders. It discusses the current international norm of uti possidetis juris, which in a nutshell, states that ethnonationality or any other sociological definition of collective self is not by itself a valid basis for claiming self-determination.

The final two chapters in Part One investigate the evolving research agenda of the English School of International Relations and its contribution to contemporary international relations. In this chapter, the author explores what may be described as the ‘new agenda’ in English School thinking about world politics. He begins by briefly tracing the long history of the concept of international society, noting how it has become synonymous with the English School despite the fact that other paradigms have also made use of the term. He moves on to reiterate one of the central claims of the first part of this book: that the English School and the concept of international society have been propelled to the forefront of contemporary debates about world politics by important sociological and normative developments in mainstream international relations in North America. He then identifies four core and as yet unsolved ‘puzzles’ that will frame the English School's new agenda as it continues to develop; these are the relationship between agency and structure, the boundaries between international society and world society, the moral basis of international society, and the tension between forces of society and hierarchy in contemporary world politics.

This chapter describes how the protection of human rights came, during World War II, to feature in schemes for creating a new world order, encouraging the drafting of comprehensive codes of rights to be protected. It considers the role of the British and American governments in this development, giving accounts both of private initiatives, such as that of H. G. Wells, and official contributions, as in the Atlantic Charter and United Nations Declaration. It describes the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, and the processes which led to the establishment of the United Nations, and the idea that it should be concerned with the international protection of human rights in the post war world. It examines the resulting expansion of the boundaries of international law at the expense of protected domestic jurisdiction.

Environmental historian Mary Mendoza’s chapter explores the riverine border between Mexico and the United States. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo called forth the International Boundary Commission to establish and mark the border separating the two republics. The commissioners, however, found a challenging type of nature along the Rio Grande, neither fully concrete nor fully imagined, but instead always shifting. Between the two nations, she argues, the political border was neither as visible nor as fixed as maps suggested. Even with later efforts to channelize the river, or to control its path through technology and infrastructure, the nature in this story remained dynamic and chaotic. The Rio Grande moved, complicating territoriality and sovereignty and undermining efforts to plat it cartographically. Statecraft, or the effort to permanently define and separate national spaces, proved elusive.

The establishment of an international boundary between the newly independent Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, which remained part of the United Kingdom, was the most important territorial division in Ireland's history. The initial geographical impacts of partition were mainly political, but the repercussions on other aspects of human geography developed with time as policies and practices in the territories diverged. These distinctions became superimposed on gradations that predated the border. Little of the new differentiation had emerged by the mid-1920s, but the existence of two states with different data sources necessitated the making of some distinctions between them in this geographical panorama, the reference date for which derives from the holding of the first separate census of population in both territories in the year 1926.

This introductory chapter discusses the vast political implications of boundary lines in creating territorial, political, and even racial, distinctions between the Plains Metis communities. Historical narratives have typically mimicked the troubled policies that sought to divide and reclassify Metis communities and to efface the linkages that spanned the international boundary. The very boundaries that marked the extent of state power were themselves rooted in the preexisting territorial claims of Indigenous nations and shaped by local interactions—of commerce, family, and politics—within Plains borderland communities. The life histories of Metis families who inhabited these communities allow us to see, up close, how these individuals had shaped the legal distinctions that colonial and state authorities sought to impose.

The paper covers research on the correlation of the principles of uti possidetis juris and self-determination in the case of Abkhazia. It argues that under the principle of uti possidetis, the former administrative borders of the Georgian SSR have been transformed into the international boundaries of the independent Georgia, and that Abkhazia, having been part of the Georgian SSR, the predecessor entity, should be considered an integral part of Georgia. The paper refers to various legal arguments and regional and international legal instruments, including internal legislation of the USSR. Analysis of the legality of Abkhaz separatists’ claims to secession under international law is also introduced herein. The chapter also considers the issues of third-state factors and their role in the Abkhaz conflict.

This chapter analyses one of the core norms of international law under the two-pillar standard of thin justice—the claims of peoples for self-government, and in particular the law on self-determination that has evolved to address those claims. It contrasts the law's endorsement of full statehood for colonial peoples seeking independence with the very limited acceptance of secession as an option for groups dissatisfied with their own state. It also considers alternative rules either to constrain secessions even more or to allow them more liberally. Along with the rules on self-determination are corresponding rules on the determination of borders. The chapter contrasts the merits of the uti possidetis rule that turned the imperial boundaries of colonies into the international boundaries of new states, with the costs of a rule, that would turn the administrative boundaries of seceding provinces into the international borders of states.

The difficulties of determining who has the right to use groundwater and how much they can pump becomes even more complicated for aquifers that cross international boundaries. The chapter discusses the few countries that have made progress in addressing transboundary aquifer issues. The chapter also provides a brief history of the Transboundary Aquifer Assessment Program along the U.S.-Mexico border to illustrate key concepts and challenges.

Chapter 9 follows the Canada–US border’s development from 1900 until the 1930s. It surveys the Alaska Boundary Survey, World War I, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and Indigenous resistance to new immigration laws. In the 1920s, the Indian Citizenship Act and National Origins Act extended federal immigration law over Indigenous people, resulting in resistance. Deskaheh (Levi General) gave speeches in Europe to garner support for the Haudenosaunee rights to self-governance. Clinton Rickard helped found the Indian Defense League of America to increase pan-Indigenous resistance to federal policy. Paul Diabo’s legal challenge to the Immigration Service’s interpretation of the Jay Treaty helped entrench Indigenous mobility as a fundamental part of the Canada–US border. As battles over citizenship and prohibition attested, increases in federal personnel did not give either country the ability to ignore popular resistance.

This concluding chapter remarks on how the kinships and other social relations constructed from Plain Metis life continue to persist in the face of legal distinctions of race and nation. Metis economic power, military might, and cultural connections to neighbors and kin, so compelling in earlier decades, had lost much of their purchase in the altered contexts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The dispersal of these borderland communities ultimately exposed the connections between the marking of national and racial boundaries and the resettlement of the North American West. At the same time, the continued ability of individuals and families to move back and forth across the border suggests an unbroken (if diminished) sense of community that continues to transcend the international boundary even today.