What do international borders actually mean?

They’ve long been a source of wars, treaties and disputes. Most don’t involve firing guns, but peace surrounding many international borders is certainly uneasy, says Mick O’Hare

Signs opposed to the Irish Sea border affixed to a lamp post in Port of Larne, Northern Ireland (Reuters)

So maybe Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal wasn’t as marvellous as he made out – certainly the citizens of Northern Ireland have their doubts. At least half the population seems pretty peeved that the border once surrounding the six counties now seems to be down the middle of the Irish Sea. And it seems they are not able to file unnecessary paperwork in the waste bin as the prime minister promised they could. What was once dismissed blithely as Project Fear might instead be baring its teeth.

But whatever the rights and wrongs of the deal, whatever the political ramifications and their effects on the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, whether that leads to a wholesale reworking of the Northern Ireland protocol or, down the line, a united Ireland, the recent violence in Belfast and elsewhere has brought into relief the significance of borders and their geographical, political and societal reasons for existing. And however much discord the impasse in Northern Ireland is precipitating, at the very least its border with the Republic in the south is one that is delineated in international law.

It’s a situation some populations could only dream of. In fact, a fair few populations. How many international border disputes are running today? Ten? Twenty? That’s nowhere near. There are estimated to be 200 plus and counting, which might give credence to those who argue the nation state is not a sensible political basis on which to organise the world. The good news is that most do not involve firing guns. Long gone has been that symbol of the Cold War and possibly the most (in)famous border in history, the Berlin Wall, but in its place are disputes ravaging relations between the likes of Ukraine and Russia, Burundi and Rwanda, Chile and Peru. Many of them predated the Berlin Wall; many have long outlasted it.