Jussi P. Laine has published a new commentary, “Viral borders, system shocks, and the limits of territorial thinking,” in Dialogues in Human Geography. Writing in the wake of the pandemic, Laine situates COVID‑19 within broader debates in border studies and asks how crisis-era governance reshaped the geographies of mobility and access. The piece extends Liu and Bennett’s influential argument by showing that global supply chains acted as bordering infrastructures themselves—producing bottlenecks, uneven access, and new forms of vulnerability far beyond state-controlled checkpoints.
Laine’s central question is whether traditional territorial frameworks can still explain how borders operate when disruptions cascade through distributed systems. His answer is cautious but clear: post‑pandemic evidence reveals bordering practices that are recursive, infrastructural, and often detached from territorial lines. The commentary calls for rethinking how sovereignty, mobility, and resilience are governed in an era defined by systemic shocks.
Full article: https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206261463544