In this marvelous book, George Gavrilis advances the key argument that the effectiveness of the management of inter-state borders is not so much a consequence of state capacity as of state-building strategies. Furthermore, positive cooperation at the border—in what Gavrilis calls a “boundary regime”—is more likely to occur if border guards are given wide-ranging competences in day-to-day decision making rather than if borders are hierarchically managed from the center. Both of these arguments form a theory of border control that runs counter to standard views that emphasize the importance of building up a strong, centrally managed border control for state building. Gavrilis sees such views as underpinning United States policy in Afghanistan and its focus on border technology and military assistance. His theory re-orients the work of policymakers as well as border scholars to the importance of locally managed border regimes and the effect of central decisions on state identity and national interest for such regimes, rather than focusing on how to build hierarchical border management capacities.

A core strength of Gavrilis's work is the detailed case studies he provides to demonstrate the workings of his two core arguments. This is not a broad or expansive test of the theory with a great number of cases. Instead, Gavrilis opts for in-depth studies that show the relevance of his arguments across historical eras and in cases where the new establishment of a border allows the tracing of the emergence of local border regimes, and the factors that influence their success or failure. The borders between Greece and the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century and between today's Central Asian republics may therefore, at first, sound as idiosyncratic choices for the empirical work, but they allow the demonstration of the theory and are, in addition, located at some of the world's more problematic border zones.

The case of the border between the Ottoman Empire and the newly founded state of Greece in its first thirty years between the 1830s and the 1860s was essentially an instance of secession, and even today, Greece and Turkey remain engaged in a series of boundary disputes. One would have therefore expected all sorts of scuffles and mutual provocations at the boundary. Yet, in his analysis of archival material, Gavrilis concludes that “within several years, [the boundary] became a site of cooperation between Ottoman and Greek border guards, who innovated procedures to administer the boundary jointly with minimal escalation of incidents” (p. 38).

That the border functioned so surprisingly well is testimony to the importance of local border regimes. Compatible state-building strategies allow border guards on both sides to share a basic understanding of the function of the border for the state project. While Greece was busy constructing its state institutions from scratch, the Ottoman Empire underwent major administrative reforms in what is known as the Tanzimat. Both capitals were therefore interested in peace and quiet at their frontiers, and they let their border guards know this and otherwise gave them a relatively free hand. This all changed when advances in map technology provided more detailed maps to now functional offices in the capitals and notions of citizenship became more prominently articulated, so that the border's function changed to become a clear delineator of state territory and identity, rather than a regulator for peaceful traffic at the frontier. As a consequence, the management of the boundary was increasingly supervised directly by the central state machinery. Yet such “top-down intervention prove[d] both unproductive and destabilizing” (p. 91). Indeed, while the two states signed a border convention in 1856, and while their relations thawed somewhat in the 1870s, Gavrilis finds that the boundary regime worsened.

There are further facilitating conditions for the success of a boundary regime. For one, border guards must have “an arena in which to communicate and propose solutions for administering the boundary” (p. 38), i.e., they need to be able to speak with each other regularly and on short notice, ideally face to face, in order to allow for the necessary coordination of their activities. They also need to be able to “monitor” each other's behavior so that agreements become credible. For advanced boundary regimes, local populations, too, take on a monitoring role, although in the Greek/Ottoman case, the complaints of local communities about violations of the border to state offices in the capital also reinforced the move towards centralization.

Gavrilis's second case consists of various Central Asian borders after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Given the common history of the post-1990 states in this region, one would have expected there to be great cooperation at the new boundaries. Yet Gavrilis shows that, in fact, the various borders have been managed quite differently. He explains this largely by reference to the different state-building strategies of the states involved and their consequent choices for the functions the new borders were to perform in terms of extraction (generating customs revenues) and coercion (preventing unwanted border crossings). Thus, “Uzbekistan the Autarch” had different boundary policy preferences from “Kyrgyzstan the Trader” and “Tajikistan the Smuggler” (p. 106–118). This not only left border guards with different definitions of their daily problems, but also often resulted in physical arrangements in which the guards had few chances to properly interact.

While on the basis of his finding, Gavrilis, as noted, is critical of US policy in Afghanistan, his emphasis on functioning local border regimes is more in tune with European Union efforts at training guards and sponsoring cooperative border monitoring. Yet he warns that these efforts will not bear fruit if they are not paired with state-building strategies in the region that are compatible with each other—and allow the border guards to do their jobs without too much interference from above.

Gavrilis locates his work in a broadly rationalist-institutionalist perspective: border regimes are institutions, the form of which is a result of the choices of state governments about the nature of their states and the functions borders are to perform as a consequence (“border security depends on institutional design” [p. 157]). A wider reference point that includes historical and sociological versions of institutionalism would, however, have been more appropriate. Thus, Gavrilis refers to constructivist and critical border theories (p. 18), without engaging with them in any serious manner. Yet his example of the continued relevance of the Ottoman institution of the derbents—locals who served as armed guards on major passageways in the Greek-Ottoman boundary regime—does show how historically grown social practices continue to shape the present.

Despite this limitation, border scholars in particular will find this work most illuminating. Further case studies are no doubt needed to substantiate them, but the arguments that Gavrilis puts forward in this book should lead policymakers and analysts alike to rethink the relationship between state building and the success of border policing, from assistance to struggling states to the erection of walls and fences in the belief that centralized control and high-end technology will guarantee successful boundary management—a belief that Gavrilis's book turns into an illusion.