Abstract
This is a remarkable book – geographically, historically, and politically – as well as being visually rich and innovative. I would not want readers to think the book is important just because of its visual style. It has much to offer debates within Geography, especially Political Geography.
The vocabulary of borders
One of the ways that Political Geography is taught, at least in English and in Geography, is that a boundary is nominally a line, and a frontier is a zone, with width. With a boundary you are either in one or the other territory, stepping between one country and another, you are either in Switzerland or France. Alternatively, a frontier zone has width, with land, things, people and relations within it. The classical example is the American West, or transitional areas between countries, or the demilitarised zones between the Turkish-occupied part of Cyprus and the republic, or between the two Koreas or Germanies. A border then is the general term, and boundaries and frontiers are the two types within it. At least, this is the way the terms are often described.
Germany is an interesting example here, as the wall around West Berlin was the best-known barrier, but the inner German border innerdeutsche Grenze between West and East was a zone. The boundary was established between the zones of occupation at Potsdam in August 1945, but the fortifications turned the boundary itself into a zone.
It has long been known that this distinction between boundaries and frontiers, and both as types of borders, itself quite specific and contested within Geography, does not always reflect the practice of naming in other languages or disciplines. Indeed, the inner German border was originally described as a Zonengrenze, a zonal boundary. The French frontière is often ‘border’ in English. Juliet Fall uses another term – ‘borderlines’ (2025: 65), a translation of lignes frontières (2024, np.). We are also reminded that the English territory, the French territoire and the Italian territorio are not strictly equivalent (2025: 136). Nor, despite all these terms deriving from the Latin territorium, is that word straightforwardly translated by any of them.
The two versions of the book Along the Line and Bornées give us a sophisticated sense of the relation between English and French languages for these terms and others. It is not just that Juliet Fall works between the two languages, but that she is her own translator. There is no question of the translator not understanding the nuance of the author here. However, there is translation going on, as the French and the English books are not the same. Most obviously, they have different titles and contents, as the French lacks the three chapters that follow the three graphic narratives. In places, where the words are not her own – quotes, names of institutions and agencies, and documents – Fall does have to translate.
The materialising of the border also complicates the distinction between a line and a zone. Materialising here should be understood both in the sense of the bordering practices used during the pandemic, which made the lines appear in the landscape, as visible and material; and also as Fall making visible the border through her actions in visiting the places, and through the words and images in this book. Both these processes show that even nominal lines are zones when transported from a map to a terrain. They include a fence, cement blocks, chains and padlocks, a wall, an impromptu barrier, a crossing point, a barricade. There are great examples with the ‘odd border’ of an “improvised barrier’, using sticks and branches, stones and tape (2025: 63–64). This is another example of upsetting the ‘neat and tidy’, of showing the ‘messy, muddy, multiple, and lively territories’ (Jackman et al., 2020: 10; quoted in Fall, 2025: 19).
There is a lot to think about here for people interested in territory, borders, frontiers and boundaries, and the work being done on dimensionality and materiality, which some have tried to discuss through vocabulary of volumes and terrain. Thinking about territory as terrain tries to capture the physical nature, the landscape of territory, through its materiality and dimensionality as volumes, not just as areas or surfaces (see Elden, 2013, 2017, 2021 and the references within them). Towards the end of the book, Fall contributes to these discussions by thinking about territory in relation to infrastructure. ‘Territory, rather than being something natural and solid, needed to be constantly remade through infrastructure, mediated through bodies and places’ (2025: 156). The book rightly recognises the ‘features of the landscape’ and their interaction with the political-legal line, even if it builds on Fall's earlier work discrediting the old idea of so-called ‘natural boundaries’ (2025: 157; Fall, 2010).
There is also some valuable historical analysis, discussing how the lines of treaties were translated into the landscape (Fall, 2025: 130), examining the boundary markers of stones and brass pegs (2025: 94), and the painting of the illustrated maps (2025: 131). The book also shows how the borders were understood historically, with the different occupying powers in World War II, from German-occupied France, the so-called Free Zone, Italian occupation of the area south of Geneva to Grenoble and the Mediterranean, and later German occupation of all of France (2025: 189). These questions could be extended with many other examples, and this book provides a rich range of things to consider for the wider field of Geography, and other disciplines in the broad field of Border Studies.
The border as concept
One question which the book provoked concerned the generalisability and specificity of concepts. For some time, the trend in Border Studies has been to see the border in places other than the edges of territorial states. The border we are told, cuts through all the places where identities are policed, whether that is offshore processing of asylum and immigration; through the hospital ward, doctor's surgery, the classroom or other places where people access services; or even that the border is ‘everywhere’. This is sometimes discussed through bordering practices, or the border as a lens rather than a line, a process rather than an object. We should be cautious of the idea that the border is everywhere, in that concepts that are that too diffuse tend to lose their analytical grip. But it seems incontestable that bordering practices have indeed extended.
Policing operates in zones in proximity to a border rather than just at the border, a process which has been going on in the United States for some time, but it is being made ever more visible through the contemporary actions of ICE. We can see it too in the response to the COVID pandemic. As well as what is documented in this book in terms of the practices at territorial borders, there were a whole set of practices elsewhere that limited movement – distance or time from home, vaccination certificates or health passes, social distancing, spacing in lecture theatres, supermarkets and waiting rooms, and the personal borders of masks or screens. Movement and connection were not entirely prevented, just as they are not prevented except at the most securitised borders, but regulated, controlled and channelled.
If it is indeed the case that the border is no longer just at the edges of states, how then do we account for the specific practices that do take place at those territorial limits? States surrounded by sea use that often inhospitable landscape as part of their protection, such as the English Channel, the Mediterranean, the Aegean Sea. Equally, the use of the desert terrain of the American west has long been used as part of the border between south-western states and Mexico. Derek Denman has recently discussed this through the idea of ‘hostile terrain’ (2025, Chapter 3). Equally, as Fall does so brilliantly in this book, there is the making visible, making tangible of what might have appeared to be invisible lines at a moment of national or global crisis.
The question then is whether, in the light of the analysis here, our border concepts – frontier or boundary, border, even territory – are sufficient to both account for the broadening of border practices and the specific status of what happens at the line, the edge, the limit? If bordering practices are indeed happening at places other than territorial limits, what use are our concepts for thinking about the specific practices at those limits?
The body and history
One of the things the book does so well is to put the body back into border studies. In my current project tracing a history of Indo-European thought in 20th-century France, which I’ve described as mapping as much as intellectual history, one of the key figures is the linguist Émile Benveniste. There are many aspects of his life and work I find interesting, but in the Second World War he was a soldier, a German prisoner, before he escaped, lived clandestinely in southern France, before deciding he needed to leave the country. He was Jewish, and felt it was unsafe to remain in France, and not without personal reason, since his brother was arrested in Paris and deported to Auschwitz.
Benveniste wrote to his former student Jean de Menasce, now teaching in Fribourg, Switzerland, asking how he was and enclosing a text written in Pahlavi which he thought would be of interest. This text was a coded message, saying that he needed to get out of France and asked for help. De Menasce wrote back, saying Benveniste's text was interesting and that he thought another text would be helpful for his research. This gave instructions for how and where to cross the border. Benveniste made the journey, presented himself to a police station in Switzerland and went through a succession of internment camps before his linguistic studies friends put up a security bond to allow him to be released. He spent the rest of the war working in the Fribourg university library, cataloguing manuscripts and impressing people with his ability to work across so many different languages.
Only a few letters between Benveniste and de Menasce survive, and the coded Pahlavi instructions have not been found, since they were probably destroyed once they had served their purpose. An account by the Fribourg librarian's brother, unpublished and in the Fribourg library archives, gives detail which corroborates other versions of the story. It also gives some indications which helped my work in Fribourg cantonal and police archives, along with federal records. The Swiss like their forms and formality, and there is a surprisingly good paper trail. Fall mentions at one point, the Swiss ‘national ideals – and stereotypes – of careful precision’ (2025: 94), and in her work she used some of these same archives (2025: 122–23). With these archival sources, a bit of hunting around with maps and reports, and especially with Juliet's guidance, we were able to pinpoint where he had crossed, across the small river Foron to the east of Geneva, the route he had taken, where the police station was, and then the succession of camps he went through. Juliet was kind enough to go to the crossing place, and share some images and film. It is another example to add to the stories told in the book, including the Jewish cemetery “with entrances in both countries” (2025: 74–75), and the crossing house of Irène Gubier (2025: 190–191).
Benveniste's experience in the war is one of the moments in my developing book manuscript where I’m able to situate the story outside of Paris classrooms and libraries, to give some valuable colour to an otherwise academic account. I would not have been able to do this nearly as well without Juliet's knowledge of the border, its histories and geographies. I make the argument that his war-time experience shaped perhaps his most-important book, and likely the one of most interest to geographers, recently re-edited as the Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society (2016), but whose literal title is the vocabulary of Indo-European institutions (1969). Fall's work adds to our understanding of bordering institutions, and Political Geography more generally, with much to offer in terms of vocabulary and visuality.
