American Crossings: Border Politics in the Western Hemisphere

Abstract

To demonstrate how the collaborative work in question contributes to the debate of political boundaries in International Relations -a debate virtually absent in the Brazilian academy -two findings stand out. The first is a broad proposal of border analysis from three approaches: geopolitical, national security and behavioural. The second finding is a specific contribution to the 'most problematic' frontier of the Southern Cone: The Triple Frontier (or Tri-Border Area) between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.In general, the authors propose that political boundaries in the Americas can be analyzed from the three approaches mentioned, each corresponding to one of the three parts of the book. The first is a classic approach to International Relations based on geopolitics and refers to territorial boundaries. In this part, the articles by Cameron Thies, Arturo Sotomayor and Kristina Mani deal essentially with the rivalries, tensions and judicial disputes generated in Latin America since independence, some of which still drag on in the contemporary period.The second proposed approach refers to national security policies and the resulting interaction of the States concerned with border entry/exit control.