Book Review: The New Border Wars: The Conflicts That Will Define Our Future

Abstract

Upon first inspection of The New Border Wars, the reader is introduced at breakneck speed to the multitude of topic areas that Professor Dodds aims to address in this work and how they are all connected to those enigmatic objects known as ‘borders’. For the overwhelming majority of humanity, borders are far-away things, lines on a map. They appear to be naturally assumed boundaries that place people into categories of ‘us’, ‘them’ and ‘elsewhere’, with little impact on people’s everyday lives. It is this basic assumption that The New Border Wars breaks down, immediately showing the reader from the introduction that borders have always been malleable tools for the powers that be to use, and often abuse, for legal, political, and (more often in our world today) financial gains.