Effects of Globalization on the Functions of Borderlines (With an Emphasis on the Persian Gulf)

Borderlines and the related changes are among the most important problems in the field of political geography. The concept of international border in the modern sense dates back to the time of the Peace Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. In the second half of the 20th century, globalization, as a multifaceted phenomenon, created several noteworthy changes in the world. In essence, globalization is an economic, cultural, political, social, and technological phenomenon which has changed almost all societies in the third millennium or prepared them for change. In this process, many concepts and variables such as government, ruling system, power, authority, balance of power, collective security, and political and social independence undergo a number of significant conceptual and objective transformations and, as a result, tighter and more profound relationships are created among different nations. Such relationships go beyond the borderlines of time and place and connect people, thoughts, data, and sources with each other in very different geographical locations. As one of the distinctive phenomena of the recent decade, globalization has affected borderlines in diverse forms and led to the development of various and contradictory viewpoints among the authorities in the realm of social sciences and the related disciplines. Accordingly, the present paper investigates the impact of globalization on the various functions of borderlines from the viewpoint of politicalgeography following an analytic-descriptive approach. Finally, the writers discuss the effects of globalization on the different relationships among the countriesin the Persian Gulf region.