Eli5: How do they decide the boundaries between nations?
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A border is just an imaginary line that only “exists” because everyone generally agrees to pretend it exists. Some times they decide where to pretend based on geographic features like a river or mountain range (often the squiggly lines you see on a map are due to this), whereas other times they just pick some line based on geographic coordinates. (To really put you in a blender, those geographic coordinates, too, are a similar case of collective hallucination.
Of course, things fall apart when people disagree over where to imagine borders. Conflicts scaling from diplomatic bickering to full-blown wars can unfold as a way of manifesting and resolving the disagreement.
It’s one of those things that people just kind of decide, like how long a meter is or what to call a newly discovered animal, but the way of coming to that decision can often be messy.
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