Alexander C. Diener

Diener and Hagen here deliver what the title of the book promises: a brief primer to the history of borders and to the field of border studies. There is some discussion of metaphorical and cultural borders, but the focus is largely on the political and the geographical, from the fluid borders of ancient empires to the (supposedly) much more rigid ones enforced by the modern nation state. While the content it covers should suit it for an undergraduate class, or for the interested layreader, Diener and Hagen's prose unfortunately lets them down. It's certainly not the worst academic writing you'll definitely read, but this book needed at least one more editing pass to take it from something aimed at an academic audience (jargon-riddled, clunky) to something that the general person might actually make it through. Calling up pages at random from the book on Amazon gives me phrases like "the increasingly transportable and multiscalar nature of territory" or "Some scholars favor a constructivist approach that rejects the environmental determinist notions of primordialists" or "territoriality stems from an a priori instinct." It's not that the ideas here aren't comprehensible—it is, if you'll forgive the metaphor, that Diener and Hagen seem to have forgotten that their task in writing this book wasn't to demonstrate their location within the borders of Academe, but to invite engagement across those borders.… (mais)