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The Border Crossings of the World (BCW) dataset explores state authority spatially by collecting information about infrastructure built where highways cross internationally recognized borders. This geolocated information is recorded using high-altitude imagery from 1993 to 2020. We describe how the data were collected, demonstrate the dataset’s utility, and offer advice and best practices regarding use of the data. These data present clear evidence of visible and long-term state investments in authoritative displays of states’ intention to ‘filter’ entry into and exit out of their national jurisdiction. Researchers can use these data to test theories on the causes and consequences of border hardening for security outcomes, border management cooperation, political violence, terrorism, trade and migration flows, transnational crime patterns, and human rights conditions. Because the data are precisely geolocated, they are easy to combine with existing spatial datasets.
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Mega-urban politics: Analyzing the infrastructure turn through the national state lens
Recent studies have focused attention on the proliferation of plans in the Global South for massive infrastructure investment to accelerate peri-urbanization and link together networks of proximate cities. This paper proposes that a focus on the national politics of the infrastructure push is an essential starting point to understand this trend, both because the national state plays a constitutive role in the processes that are shaping emerging urbanity, and because national states are themselves being transformed by this moment. In pursuing infrastructure-driven extended urbanization, national state actors seek to capitalize on moments of opportunity presented by shifts in the investment priorities of transnational financial actors, and by advances in infrastructure and logistics technologies, to gain power through the formation of political regimes based on economic growth and the distribution of rents from land development. Hence extended urbanization proceeds not as a gradual and linear process, but is instead marked by waves of disruptive and politically contentious reforms and plans intended to enable real estate, infrastructure, and logistics megaprojects. The current wave of political projects around extended urbanization is marked by distinct features, including the increasingly fragmented and decentered nature of transnational finance, and geopolitical dynamics associated with the emergence of an increasingly polycentric global order. It is consequently marked by geopolitical competition to shape emergent state agendas of extended urbanization, and by increasing variegation in the models of infrastructure-driven extended urbanization that state actors adopt. The paper illustrates these arguments with examples from Southeast Asia's mega-urban regions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1759596
- PAR ID:
- 10383448
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
- Volume:
- 54
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0308-518X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 845 to 866
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221087713
