I’d rather not talk about that… Maybe we could leave that bit out… I’m not sure I should say anything more on that subject… Off the record I could say…’

Interviewing Martin Pratt is a rather difficult task. As head of the International Boundaries Research Unit (IBRU), he advises on border disputes around the world, and consequently, much of his work is top secret.

The IBRU, the world’s first boundary study centre, was established at Durham University’s geography department in 1989, and is now a self-funded business that advises everyone ‘who bumps into a boundary and realises they don’t know much about it’.

‘I often say we have one foot in academia and one foot in the real world,’ says Pratt, who spends half his time in the UK and the other half overseas running training courses or using his geographical and archival knowledge to advise clients ranging from oil companies to NGOs and governments.

With its work often taking in some of the most heated disputes on the planet, including many in Africa and the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, one might expect the IBRU offices to be littered with flak jackets and snapshots of staff smiling beside guerrilla leaders, not to mention a general air of derring-do hanging in the hallways. But Pratt laughs at the suggestion. ‘We try to avoid the danger,’ he says. ‘We tend to get parachuted in as experts. Meetings tend to be at quite a senior level in a comfortable environment.’ Indeed, the office – where five full-time staff work – is rather ordinary, with just the odd exotic item, such as a large dried Sudanese gourd, and the occasional foreign map hinting at the overseas work they do.

Much of this work focuses on pinpointing the location of a boundary (‘the line of no thickness where one state ends and another begins’, explains IBRU research associate John Donaldson, compared to ‘borders’, which can be either a line or a region). And that isn’t always as simple as it sounds. ‘We talk about boundary recovery,’ says Pratt. This process can range from interviewing villagers on the Cameroon–Nigeria frontier about where they thought the boundary was located to trawling through thousands of documents in UK archives in connection with disputed islands off Borneo. ‘It’s a sort of detective work, piecing together evidence and trying to build up the most accurate picture we can.’

Inadequate definition
‘Most boundary disputes tend to be based on the fact that the original boundary was inadequately defined,’ says Pratt, citing as an example the armistice line in the Israel–Palestine conflict, which was literally the line between the two warring sides when they stopped fighting in 1948, but is now the basis for any future peace settlements.

‘In Jerusalem, it was drawn on the hood of a Jeep, in the middle of a gun battle, while the two commanders were ducking bullets,’ says Pratt. ‘They used a grease pencil (a sort of crayon), which meant that when the lines were translated onto a large-scale map, they were up to 30 metres wide. So, immediately, people were asking where the actual line was supposed to be. And the Israel–Palestine conflict being what it is, they then spent the next 30 years arguing about it.’

Computers have made newer boundaries more accurate, but these sometimes clash with the paper-drawn lines. ‘There’s a great story about the continental shelf boundary between the UK and Norway,’ says Pratt. ‘It was agreed in two parts. One was in 1965 using paper charts and the second half was in 1978 using mathematical algorithms. And at the point where they were supposed to meet, there was a gap of about 331 metres.’ Almost inevitably, that gap contained an oil field. ‘It’s sometimes said that the UK lost hundreds of millions of pounds because of that “error”.’

New visualisation techniques have also helped countries agree on new borders. Pratt says the 3D animated fly-throughs of the former Yugoslavian border regions created by the USA for the Dayton peace agreement of 1995, which ended the Bosnian war, helped leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic to understand the landscape and the areas of land they were giving up. But, he believes, in a time when boundaries are largely constructed by lawyers, geographers still have an important role to play.

‘Geographical expertise is critical at all stages,’ he says. ‘Borders are inherently geographical. They run through physical and human landscapes. You can’t get away from that. You can abstract them – and lawyers tend to do that – but, boundaries will only be successful if they reflect the physical and, particularly, the human context in which they run. I think it’s vital that there are people involved in the process who have a sensitivity to those landscapes.

‘And, on a more technical level, geographers are people who understand maps and coordinates. You wouldn’t believe the mess that the International Court of Justice [the last resort for countries involved in a border dispute] has made by defining borders in terms of coordinates and then not specifying a datum [a reference point from which measurements are made]. Without it, the coordinates aren’t completely meaningless, but you have a big zone of uncertainty.’

Borderless world
Geographical knowledge is also becoming increasingly important as a race for resources has turned the world’s attention to maritime boundaries – largely defined by geographical terms such as ‘islands’ or ‘indented coastlines’. More than half of these 434 possible boundaries have yet to be agreed and, as technological developments allow oil and gas companies to drill further off shore, and the Arctic ice cap continues to melt, more people are wanting to know who has rights over which bits of seabed.

 Despite this area of new work, talk of an emerging borderless world suggests that the IBRU has a finite lifespan, but the IBRU staff aren’t getting too concerned. ‘The 1990s were full of ideas such as a borderless world. It was very much driven by business players and business globalisation, but these ideas were never applied to subjects such as migration,’ says Professor Steve Graham, academic director of the IBRU. He says that borders have actually become more militarised over the past decade, fuelled by fear of terrorism and a defence industry eager to find new markets. And crossing them has become more difficult for many people.

‘If a borderless world is a reality anywhere, it’s in Europe, for those countries signed up to the Schengen agreement [a 1985 treaty signed by five EC countries and now consisting of 25 countries that have agreed to the removal of border controls],’ says Pratt. ‘And the only way borderless Europe has been able to become a reality is by hardening that outer edge around the soft centre.’

He’s wary of ‘the securitisation discourse, which has led to a proliferation of walls, fences and other physical barriers along many of the world’s boundaries’, believing that it ‘has many flaws and tends to undermine borderland development. Borders used to be attractive things. Left alone, they can be very dynamic places. People congregate there for a mix of culture and trade. Throughout history, that’s been the case, but now they’re starting to be seen as problems.’

And good fences don’t necessarily make good neighbours, as highly militarised borders stop people intermingling and trading, which can lead to alienation and anger. ‘Israel would say its barrier has been a success because there have been hardly any terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians [since it was constructed], but it has led to resentment building up on the Palestinian side that guarantees that the conflict will last longer in the long run,’ says Pratt. ‘It’s not about building good fences. It’s about managing borders effectively and making sure they don’t become an impediment to people’s lives.’


A brief history of borders
‘We take it for granted that every single person on the Earth has to be a citizen of a nation state, but that’s an incredibly recent idea,’ says Steve Graham, IBRU’s academic director. ‘In the Middle Ages, the more important border was between the city and the exterior world. Europe was full of city states.

‘The national border wasn’t invented until about the 15th or 16th century in Europe and much, much later in the rest of the world, often after the Second World War and tied to the independence of the colonies,’ he continues. Around 40 per cent of the land boundaries outside Europe were the creation of Britain and France, and more than half were the creation of European powers, according to IBRU founder Gerald Blake.

So while there might be talk of a ‘borderless world’ in Europe, African and Asian countries are having to contend with the proliferation of borders imposed on their own ‘borderless world’ just 50 years ago.


A river runs through them
One of IBRU’s latest projects, funded by the RGS-IBG, aims to map all of the world’s land borders that follow the line of a river or stream.

Historically favoured by Europeans for their defensive value and used by colonial powers to carve up overseas territories because they were considered cheap to delineate and often the only feature marked on explorers’ maps – although, coming from Europe, where rivers tend to be permanent fixtures, officials were often surprised to find their borders had moved several kilometres during the monsoon or even vanished completely – waterways now make up about 30 per cent of the world’s 255,168 kilometres of land borders.

‘I’ve always been fascinated by river boundaries,’ says John Donaldson, the IBRU research associate carrying out the work. ‘On the one hand, they divide people, but on the other, they’re a shared resource, almost forcing states to cooperate on water issues.’

After spending more than two years collecting details of more than 1,200 river boundaries, Donaldson hopes that his database will encourage a debate on transboundary resources at a time when many of these resources, especially water, are being put under pressure from growing human populations.

‘Water levels in the Rio Grande between the USA and Mexico have become so low in recent years that no water has actually reached the Gulf of Mexico,’ says Donaldson. ‘The boundary commission originally set up to mark the boundary now spends most of its time allocating water resources.’

Three river boundary disputes are currently being heard in the International Court of Justice: Hungary versus Slovakia, Costa Rica versus Nicaragua, and Argentina versus Uruguay. While this gives an indication of the tensions that can arise from shared river boundaries, as Donaldson says, ‘At least they’re trying to resolve their disputes in a peaceful manner.’

May 2009