Are borders real or imaginary? Do borders require a territory or area of land, or are there domains without physical space that still contain borders?

In this week’s podcast, and in light of recent events, we discuss the complexity of borders and jurisdictions. We explore territorialism in the animal kingdom, the history and economics of borders, and how borders can shape national identity. Finally, we share some of our favourite borders.

A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

• Chimp war
• The chitmahals of West Bengal
• What exactly is the point of the border?
• India–Bangladesh enclaves
• List of territorial disputes

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Jordan Fermanis, Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing borders, boundaries and jurisdictions. Chris, some serious stuff happened recently to do with this. It's all in the news,

So yes, obviously we're talking about the major border transgression that's that's happened recently in the news. That's the story of Chester FC, the English National League North team, and their sort of ignoring of Welsh lockdown rules. So this was the story around December time, also very, very, very topical, of the essentially Wales and England had different lockdown sort of restrictions going on at the time and the Welsh rules stated that football teams, professional and semi-professional football teams, were not allowed to have crowds at their games. They weren't allowed to have spectators, whereas in England teams were allowed to continue having crowds during the sort of Christmas period and Chester FC fell foul of this because although they play in the English National League and are part of an English town, they are right on the border and their stadium is actually literally sort of millimetres over the Welsh, the official Welsh border. All of it or bits of it? Well, the vast majority of it. I think there's something like a burger van or something that sits the other side of it, but literally the border goes there and there's this one sort of outbuilding that is the wrong side of the border. So it's very marginal and they continued to have spectators to their games in sort of contravention of Welsh legislation, arguing that they were an English club, they played in the English league, whereas Welsh teams were able to claim subsidies if they were part of the Welsh league for not having spectators, Chester FC weren't, they said they would go bust, etc, etc. So it got me thinking at the time when I thought about this topic of the issue of borders and what they're for and what they mean in the modern world. Obviously with current events we have a much more grave, sinister

sort of backdrop to this discussion now. Yeah, I mean just for the record and obviously we can't make light of this, but we're recording the day after probably what's sort of the official bit where Russia invaded Ukraine, which was really yesterday I would say, and today's the day when they think that Kiev will probably be assaulted. I mean I think borders are interesting because they're not real, right? So they're a bit like money, right? I mean I forget what that book is, Homosapiens, I can't remember, where he talks about stuff and money's an example, there's loads of other, the law, it's not real, right? It's real because we believe it to be real.

Out of interest, has the border moved east or west? Is Offa's Dyke now mainly in Wales or in

England? I think it's different in different places.

Right, so it's not like we shouldn't be demanding a return to the 850 borders or anything like that. No, no, well perhaps.

Oh look, let's define this question a little more closely because I think how you've raised it so far is, you know, borders, what's that all about kind of thing. So, I mean specifically what do we want to say?

Well, I've got a few things to say actually, so Mr Putin had better be listening. I think even though you think this falls in the same category as e.g. money and the law, I would say there's a big difference, which is that, for example, animals are territorial. Animals have territories and they, well not all of them, apparently only a minority of animals are territorial in the sense that they'll defend a territory that they have. So most animals will have an area that's called the home range, which is where they operate, but only a few will have a territory that they'll stop other animals coming into. Can you tell me more about that? So give me a couple of examples.

Dogs weeing on lampposts, you know, and barking at the postman when they come to the door.

That's right, so a dog, I mean, so a cat, for example, would have a home range which might be, you know, take in all the nearby gardens, but it might only be defensive about, you know, its own house or whatever. But then this actually is dependent on certain things. But, you know, large predators will fight off other predators who come near if they've got a good hunting ground because it's, you know, an existential thing for them that they retain access to the things that keep them alive. So obviously territoriality, it can be predicted by using, yes, economics. It does boil down to costs and benefits. So whether or not animals are territorial depends, well, essentially the amount of area you need to survive is a key one. So if you're a plant, you only need your own footprint by and large, although you can argue that trees are territorial. Plants are territorial though. Well, they are. But the point is that they don't need a large area to survive, right? A plant needs really the area that it's on to survive. Well, no, because they propagate. Yeah, OK. What I'm saying is a plant can stay alive by staying where it is. I mean, which is a good thing because that's what they do. Plants don't go hunting. Well, they do. They do. Fraser, a plant doesn't go and wander around to find sunlight. They sort of do.

It doesn't, but it does grow. There's obviously, what's it called? I think you two are being ridiculous.

I'm not. I'm being serious, actually. You must have watched Life of Plants, David Attenborough.

You saw what they did and they speeded up. It was outrageous.

But the point is that animals which feed on plants, they need a much larger area than themselves to survive. And animals which feed on those animals need a larger area again, right? So there is some area that you need to survive. Now, the interesting thing is actually if that area is really small or really big, well, actually, the bigger the area gets, the harder it is to defend anyway. So you're less likely to get territoriality if you need a really big area to survive. But it's also to do with being kind of clumped. So if resources tend to be clumped in one place and but also predictably clumped there. So if the animals you feed on, for example, are always migrating to this one spot, which is ideal for hunting, then that will be valuable to defend and won't be too difficult to defend. And if you look at, I read that hyenas in areas where there sort of is abundant food will be territorial. But when they're in the savannah, for example, they will tend to just wander around nomadically and hunt. This is all about economics. It's all about economics. It's about scarce resources. But I'll finish this by saying, what then are humans? Well, one of the most territorial animals in the world is the chimpanzee. I don't know if you're up on your Darwin, but we're very closely related to your chimpanzee. Some of us more than others. Indeed. Chimpanzees are unbelievably territorial and extremely unpleasant about it. I was reading an article in The Guardian describing this study in Uganda in which they looked at this sort of gang of chimpanzees. I suppose we might call it a chimpanzee nation if we were to try and make the analogy explicit, who carried out violent attacks on chimps in other rival groups. And they recorded 18 separate attacks over the course of this period of time. And effectively, this gang of chimpanzees took over the territory of another gang, settled in and sort of started enjoying the benefits of that new territory. They expanded their borders effectively by about a fifth through violence. Hold on. So maybe they're not real, but the point is that they're driven by real things. They're driven by real things, which are the availability of resources and the ease with which those resources can be defended. It's an optimal strategy is what I'm saying. Money isn't necessarily an optimal strategy, although it's a good technology. Borders are actually an optimal strategy for animals. Okay. I was going to say something. What do you mean there? Borders are optimal strategies? What I mean is if one group of chimpanzees said, hey guys, why don't we just live without borders? Another group of chimpanzees would go in and exploit them. So yeah, there is a difference.

But obviously, Antarctica, which is not particularly populated, there are a number of territorial disputes around. And if you look at the island of Rockall, right, out in the sort of North Atlantic, it's only seagulls and gannets, I think, that live on it. And yet it is disputed. And the occasional Royal Marine. And the occasional Royal Marine, exactly, raising his flag. Yeah. But that's territorially disputed. And I have no doubt that space is indeed the next frontier of potential territorial conflict.

Quite. Look, what can we say that a biologist wouldn't say? If only we knew any biologists, if there's any around, tell us. What can we say that a biologist couldn't say, that an economist wouldn't say? What can we add to this? I'm resting my hopes in you, Jordan. Go for it.

It's maybe not that borders are not real, but they can sort of appear arbitrary in the sense that, yeah, you have like the cyber space domain, they feel kind of borderless. Then you have, you know, in Dubai, for example, they just built islands and that creates borders sort of artificially. You have people that are stateless that live between many borders. And you can also just declare like Putin has just done that things, territories when they weren't before. So I think there is that border that you think exists. It doesn't exist. Yeah. So there is a sort of degree to which maybe that you can sort of play with the definition of borders.

And I think the difference between, one of the primary differences between us and animals in this context is that we have a wide range of mechanisms for deciding borders and strategies for deciding them. So, you know, you look at all the different, you know, so Putin has sort of, has actually hearkened back to historic borders and, you know, the extent of the Russian empire and what is, in his views, a valid Ukrainian border being much smaller than the ex-Soviet state of Ukraine. So there's this idea of history being important in borders. But you've also got things like national self-determination, you know, the rights of the seagulls and gannets on Rockall to decide which nation they want to be part of, or indeed the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands. But then you also have experiments in getting rid of borders. So the UK, you know, you had Hadrian's Wall and Offa's Dyke, and now it is a borderless place, although we've obviously got issues now with Northern Ireland and Brexit and so on. And you look at the Schengen area, you know, so we are also able to give up borders to some extent. So I think we have politics as well as force, you know, we're seeing, you know, there are a lot of, I think there's 122 currently registered territorial disputes going on. Not all of them involve force of arms. In fact, the minority of them do. So we have a lot of other mechanisms that our human brains enable us to go through. I'm sure animals negotiate in their own way as well. But yeah.

It makes me think of some of the most vicious disputes there are, sort of neighbours falling out with one another as well, which is, you know, about borders as well. Where do we go with this? I mean, I'd like to hear more from Jordan at some point. But yeah, Nick.

Well, I think there is some, there are reasons to think that there might be unavoidable elements, which, you know, which we require to get on as a society that require borders. I do want to talk about what would it look like if we got rid of borders altogether or got rid of kind of Westphalian style national borders. But just worth saying that, you know, in order to, well, let's take law. If you think we shouldn't have laws that are centrally enforced, then fine, that, you know, basically you're an anarchist. But if you're not, if you think that having a law and a central enforcement agency is good, then you've got to decide which laws apply where or to who. Now, at the moment, we're doing it on where. So if you're in a particular place, it'll be defined which laws apply to that place, and there'll be a government who's trying to enforce it. Now, you could say, well, why don't we, instead of having it based on where, have it based on who? Have, well, you know, why couldn't we have laws that apply to a bunch of different people dotted around? Such as apartheid, for example. Right. Exactly. So you have different laws for different people, but perhaps even different enforcement agencies where you might go, where you can sign up, sign up to be like, you can, apparently you can become an Estonian online, but you don't have to go there. And, you know, could you just start your own nation and say, right, we'll get, you know, I'm now, although I live in Paris, I'm now a member of this new nation, and I'm going to stop paying tax to the French government. I'll start paying tax to this exciting international online nation. Well, obviously, the problem is externalities, which it often comes down to, is that I can't not have an effect on people near me when I'm in, when I'm living in Paris. If I make noise, I'm exporting that noise to France from my little micro nation inside my living room, that is having an effect on people near me. If I want to go to the shops, I'm, if I decide that I'm paying with a different kind of money, well, that's not going to work, is it? You know, and if I decide to go and, you know, punch a Frenchman in the face, that then I'm still, you know, someone has to decide which laws apply. Because of your ability to affect people. And, you know, even more so because of the ability of outsiders to, you know, invade an area. And when if someone, if Vladimir Putin had a dispute with your neighbour, and fired a cruise missile at his house, that would have an effect on you. There are all these reasons why it actually does make sense to have borders based on where, based on a contiguous geographic area. Until we've got rid of the physical world, a contiguous area just is a

kind of natural equilibrium. Yes. Okay. That was a rather nice sort of, yeah, right. Thank you for listening to that. Don't be silly, we've got loads more to do. Where do we go from there? Yeah, well,

I don't want to be this side of this border. Yeah, I think that's, I think when there's an absence of a physical border, like an ocean, sea, mountain, river, and it's just land that has to be carved up, because that will inevitably mean you have these crossovers and blended sort of, you have, you know, cultural groups that might exist expansively, it's really difficult to draw sort of clearly defined lines and borders around bits of territory that people share. Especially when you look at it from a historical perspective, because those things are shifting all the time. Yeah, this might be included

that treaty, but you know, the one that leaps out is Balkans, right? So I think it might be worth

benefits would be. Okay. We're getting towards the end. Okay. I want to ask you, first of all, are there any points that you still would like to make? Secondly, you were starting to move there towards a kind of a future looking forward thing. Maybe that's an area we might want to delve into further. Let's see if we do that or not in a minute. But first of all, if you've got any sort of final points you want to make, go for it. Yeah, I was just going to say, you know, in terms

of what borders are for in today's context, when we hear about borders, you know, it really seems to be about two things, I think one is, one is about migration, and the desire of more affluent countries to keep out people who don't come from similarly affluent countries. And, you know, the issue of using a border as a protection against immigration. And the other is about sort of tax and jurisdictions and, you know, often the transfer of goods across borders and excise duty and those kinds of things. And when Nick was touching on it a little bit there about, you know, these companies can pick themselves up and go somewhere else. And they are very often do for tax purposes, you know, they, because physical location is no longer important, they can move themselves somewhere else. And that I think it would be interesting to think about both of those trends going forward, you know, we talk about globalisation and people being able to move freely and ideas being able to move freely. But is that something we're really going to enable? Or are we still going to jealously guard our own territories? And also, what do we what do we do when things can just pick up and vanish, you know, in a puff of smoke and appear somewhere else inside another border?

It feels like we're talking about maybe declining sovereignty of states or against their vested

interest as well, maybe, I don't know. Jordan? Chris just reminded me of when I was doing research on the migration issue, and I came across this, like in Australia, when they had the £10 POM policy, where people from Great Britain could migrate to Australia, they weren't called migrants, because the reason behind that was that you couldn't migrate from one part of Britain to another, being from the UK to Australia. So they weren't called migrants, even though they'd clearly come from the other side of the world. So I think there's always also been this interesting relationship between like the physical space, and then like the culture and the political layers as well on top of that. But yeah, maybe moving forward, that will accelerate into a new sort of domain. Yeah, I mean, it's I suppose it's plausible that

if law, law is the ultimate sort of decider, really, which law applies here. It makes sense if law is related to culture, you know, if some countries have different laws, because their culture is different, sort of makes sense that the culture and the law ought to line up. If law is a reflection of agreement on behavioural norms, then you know, that's a fundamental reason why you might want borders to follow cultural boundaries. But anyway.

I suddenly feel, I just feel like we've all gone a bit flat suddenly. Oh, yeah. Okay, good. I've probably got a silly question to ask.

Yeah, energise us with a silly question, Fraser.

Okay. Yeah, potential silly question. Best border. Okay. So it could be best border, what you think, or best border that you've crossed, best border that, you know, worst border that you weren't able to cross, which reminds me of Chris's brother. Chris?

Yeah, so I think my favourite border is when I was perhaps about 12, perhaps slightly younger, we went across Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. Yeah. And that was an incredible cultural border, because to all intents and purposes, the underlying culture of the people either side was the same, they were German, they spoke German, they had more or less the same history that had only been interrupted by that point. I don't know, perhaps, well, 61, the Berlin Wall went up, but let's say from the 40s, you know, mid 40s onwards. So it was 30 odd years or something of difference. But it was just an unbelievable difference and so surreal to go from, you know, this cafe culture in West Berlin, to, you know, empty shops and people queuing for, and it being just like you'd seen on the, you know, I kind of, even as a young, you know, as a boy, I still had this sense that we were probably being fed a load of rubbish through the TV about how bad it was in East Germany. But it actually really was depressing and weird, this feeling of austerity and, you know, being over, you know, being watched and, yeah, very interesting experience and yeah, informative years. So that would be mine.

Nice. Jordan?

The equator? I don't know if that's a border. Yeah, let's call it a border. Yeah, I remember being, I think it's in South America somewhere and you can go, you can put like a foot on each side of the equator, be in both hemispheres at the same time.

Were you nearly ripped apart by the G forces? Yeah, it was quite cool. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, that's it. I'll go next, Nick, and then we'll hear yours. No, because you always have a good one. That's why. So the border at the airport in Caracas, yeah, because I was there once in the height of Chavismo, and you had lots of these, when you, I mean, kind of the opposite end of the spectrum, when you think of FARC in Colombia, and they often see these visions of these beautiful Latina, but toting M-16s and that kind of stuff. So that's what most of the airport security looked like in Caracas at the time. And there was this really beautiful border guard. And I nearly went up to her and asked for her to take a photo. And thank God I didn't, because actually, I saw her being a bit rough with someone else a bit later, you know, and jabbing the butt of her gun against them. But still, I liked that border. That was a good one. Nick.

My favourite border that I've crossed is the Green Line in Cyprus. Okay. Probably pretty similar to Chris, you know, crossing the Berlin Wall. It's an instant change in the way it looks and in the culture and everything. And but you get this weird little actual stretch of no man's land watched over by the UN, which is almost like a little transition. It's like getting in the kind of road equivalent of a tube and, you know, getting on the tube in Leicester Square and getting out in Reislip or something. But over the space of a couple of hundred metres, you know, it's extraordinary. You go from this sort of very highly developed bit of, I think it's Nicosia. And then on the other side, it's sort of like, you know, Turkey in 20, 30 years ago. It's all a bit run down, but laid back and, you know, everyone looks different. Extraordinary. But my favourite actual border in the world, in fact, the best border in the world. Yeah. Is the Chitmahals of the India-Bangladesh border, which due to extremely complex negotiations at various times, ended up with a situation where there's 102 Indian enclaves within Bangladesh. A hundred and two? Yeah, but steady on because that's not. And within those 102 enclaves, there are 21 Bangladeshi enclaves. So in other words, you're in Bangladesh, but you've got to cross India to get back to the rest of Bangladesh. And the Indians there have to cross a bit of Bangladesh to get back to India. But why do you like this border? It sounds like a nightmare. Because one of these Bangladeshi enclaves then contains a further Indian enclave. So if that fellow living there, it's called Dahala Kagrabari. If you live there and you're Indian, you'd have to cross a bit of Bangladesh, then a bit of India, and then another bit of Bangladesh to get back to India.

I doubt that they think it's a great border or these are great borders.

No, but it's clearly awesome. Imagine if that didn't exist. Then we could all live in peace. Well, it's all possibly a model for this future, you know, personal subscription based nationhood. Who knows? Do they all rub along okay? India and Bangladesh are famously best pals.

No, but what I mean is just those locals going across those borders, are they really borders? Is it a bit of a nightmare? Is it they just go, hey, we live here and we actually quite like it? I don't think you know the answer.

I've never been there, so I don't know. I can't report faithfully. Just like any good British person, I've looked at a map and I said, that's interesting. Resisted the urge to draw a straight line across it and say, that'll do. Yeah. Very good. Very good.

All right. We'll stop there. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Jordan Fermanis, Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. And until next time, goodbye.