Opportunity, Willingness and Geographic Information Systems (gis): Reconceptualizing Borders in International Relations1

This paper continues a project which has developed a major reconceptualization and revision of how borders may be seen and measured through the use of GIS by allowing us to talk about the specific qualities of borders in terms of opportunity and willingness: ease of interaction and salience, respectively. This reconceptualization has also lead to the creation of a dataset which lets us go beyond simply observing the number of borders a state possesses, whether or not a border existed between two states, or the length of that border. Paper prepared for the conference, "New Methodologies for the Social Sciences: The Development and Application of Spatial Analysis for Political Methodology," Institute of Behavioral Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, March 10-12, 2000.