Borders are geographic boundaries of political entities or legal jurisdictions, such as governments, sovereign states, federated states, and other subnational entities.
Borders are established through agreements between political or social entities that control those areas, the creation of these agreements is called boundary delimitation.
Some borders such as a state’s internal administrative border, or inter-state borders within the Schengen Area are often open and completely unguarded.
Other borders are partially or fully controlled, and may be crossed legally only at designated border checkpoints and border zones may be controlled.
Borders may even foster the setting up of buffer zones.
A difference has also been established in academic scholarship between border and frontier, the latter denoting a state of mind rather than state boundaries.
The frontiers were particularly porous for the physical movement of migrants, and people living in borderlands easily maintained transnational cultural and social networks.
A border may have been:
Agreed by the countries on both sides
Imposed by the country on one side
Imposed by third parties, e.g. an international conference
Inherited from a former state, colonial power or aristocratic territory
Inherited from a former internal border, such as within the former Soviet Union
Never formally defined.
In addition, a border may be a de facto military ceasefire line.
Recently a border fence was erected between German city of Constance and the Swiss city of Kreuzlingen, which had become a symbol of the division created by the global pandemic.
But after Switzerland and Germany agreed to open up, the fence came down by midnight.
