The 'Nature' of Contiguous Borders: Ease of Interaction,Salience, and the Analysis of Crisis

This paper presents the dataset developed from an NSF-supported project on reconceptualizing borders through the use of geographical information systems (GIS). After presenting an overview of the 301 contiguous land borders which were remeasured in terms of ease of interaction (opportunity), and salience/importance (willingness), the dataset is used to revisit hypotheses dealing with territory and borders, specifically four hypotheses developed by Brecher and Wilkenfeld (1997) from their International Crisis Behavior (ICB) project. The results support the design and purpose of the GIS project of reconceptualizing borders, which breaks away from the dichotomous characterization of states as contiguous or non-contiguous in order to examine the "nature" of borders. Our results do not fit the expectations of the "standard" adversarial proximity conflict model, and demonstrate that the border reconceptualization presented here can be used to investigate a number of related questions in the study of international politics involving both cooperative processes as well as conflictual ones.