The Analysis of Geopolitics: Reconceptualizing International Borders through the Application of GIS (Geographic Information Systems)

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Over the past 15 years there has been a renewed attention to the role and impact of geography in the study of international relations. Much of this is related to the `new geopolitics: which treats geography as an essential part of the context of possibilities and constraints that face foreign policy decision makers. Based on earlier work which conceptualized and described international borders, this projects seeks to establish a major reconceptualization and revision of how borders may be seen (theory) and measured (method). The use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) permits a much fuller and clearer specification of borders by allowing an operationalization of the specific qualities of borders in terms of opportunity and willingness: ease of interaction and salience, respectively. Using data available in the data layers found in ARC/INFO's Digital chart of the world, indexes of both ease of interaction and of salience have been constructed. These indexes aggregate values generated from ARC/INFO. they can be used to characterize any border (or arc) or border segment on the globe. thus, the use of a GIS dataset permits a new mechanism for operationalizing a state's borders. Through the indexes generated, values can be attached to the ease of interaction a border or border segment provides, and/or the importance of any particular border or border segment. These two dimensions can be used separately or combined. A border with high values on both could be considered a `Vital Border.` The GIS generated indexes permit investigators to tap both dimensions, and to use them singly or combined given the research under consideration. This theoretically based reconceptualization will lead to the creation of a dataset which will permit research to go beyond simply observing the number of borders a state possesses, whether or not a border existed between two states, or the length of that border. The dataset to be produced should be of interest to numerous scholars in international relations and geography and regional science.