Four Apartments, Two Countries,
and Fifty Years of Asking Why
By Daniel Covarrubias, Ph.D.
Published in the Rio Grande Guardian · March 2026
The town is called Baarle. Half of it is Belgian (Baarle-Hertog), half is Dutch (Baarle-Nassau). It contains 30 enclaves.
22 Belgian parcels within the Netherlands, colored below in gold. Each is sovereign Belgian territory completely surrounded by the Netherlands.
...and 8 Dutch counter-enclaves nested inside the Belgian ones — like geographic Matryoshka dolls. The Netherlands, inside Belgium, inside the Netherlands.
Where your front door sits determines your nationality, your tax code, your electricity provider. One family famously moved their front door a few meters to switch countries.
During COVID, Belgian lockdown rules shut down businesses on one side of a street while Dutch shops across the hallway stayed open. Same building, different pandemic.
Albuquerque, New Mexico · Old Town
I learned about Baarle over dinner at the Association for Borderlands Studies' 50th-anniversary conference in Albuquerque last week. A European colleague told the story between courses in Old Town, and the table couldn't stop asking questions.
“The panels are good, but the best material surfaces over meals.”
And it struck me: this is what border scholars actually spend their time thinking about. Not walls and checkpoints (though those came up too), but the infinitely strange, creative, sometimes absurd ways that human beings organize life around lines drawn on maps.
ABS 50th Anniversary · Albuquerque
150 Researchers, 20+ Countries, 40 Sessions
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Researchers
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Countries
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Sessions
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Years
“Someone mentioned that border studies, once considered a dead subfield, isn't anymore.”
What a border actually is
Legal Boundary
Which laws apply to you.
Economic Membrane
Which goods move freely and which don’t.
Cultural Seam
Where languages, customs, and identities overlap or collide.
Lived Experience
How real people organize their mornings, their commutes, their kids’ schools.
Baarle isn't strange because its border is complicated.
Baarle is just honest about what every border really is.
The World Trade Bridge · Laredo, Texas
Multiple Borders at One GPS Coordinate
Regulatory realities passed through: 1 / 5
The cargo doesn't change. The truck doesn't change. But the legal, economic, and regulatory reality shifts with every step.
That's not one border. That's multiple borders stacked on top of each other at the same GPS coordinate.
The Baarle Solution
Shared Institutions
In Baarle, they solved this by building governance that crosses the border even though the border itself never moves.
Joint municipal sessions
Both councils meet together to coordinate across the border line.
Shared police station
Belgian and Dutch officers working out of the same building.
Merged fire departments
Unified since 2010. A fire doesn’t check your passport.
Joint library
Staff from both countries. Books in Dutch and French.
The line stays, but the institutions learn to work across it.
The Roundtable
Trade Flows ≠ Integration
Volume
$400B
Annual trade through Laredo alone
5M+
Truck crossings per year
$872.8B
Total bilateral trade
Integration
Joint water management framework
Shared workforce development
Binational environmental governance
One colleague made a point that stuck with me: trade flows don't equal integration. The fact that trucks cross a bridge doesn't mean the economies on either side are actually integrated. Real integration requires institutional, environmental, and social infrastructure — not just commercial volume.
Without it, you get what another panelist called “savage integration” — growth without the architecture to sustain it.
The manufacturing ladder that lifted previous generations of countries into high-income status is plateauing for middle-income economies like Mexico, just as AI begins restructuring the service sectors they're supposed to transition into. The rules aren't the problem. The institutional and educational infrastructure to manage that kind of structural shift doesn't exist yet.
1976 — 2026
Fifty Years of Border Scholarship
1976
ABS Founded
Ellwyn Stoddard, Richard Bath, Oscar Martinez, and Anthony Kruszewski at a WSSA meeting in Tempe, Arizona.
1986
Journal of Borderlands Studies
First published. Now 40 years old and the primary forum for interdisciplinary border research.
1989
First Woman President
Joan B. Anderson becomes the first woman to serve as ABS president.
1996
First Woman Editor-in-Chief
Joan B. Anderson becomes the first woman editor-in-chief of JBS.
2022
New Leadership
Daniel Covarrubias begins as Executive Secretary & Treasurer.
2026
50th Anniversary
Celebrated in Albuquerque. 55 countries. The leading global scholarly association on border issues.
“A macroeconomist is working with sociologists, anthropologists, and geographers. That's like the definition of border studies.”
— Joan B. Anderson (1938–2026)
First woman to serve as both ABS president and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Borderlands Studies.
That’s the work.
Not erasing borders, but building the institutions that make them functional.
Whether it’s a house on Loveren Street with two addresses or a port in Laredo processing $400 billion in trade, the question is the same:
Once you draw the line, how do you live with it intelligently?
The 150 researchers in Albuquerque last week are working on that answer.
Fifty years in, the field has never been more relevant.
