© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi �0.��63/ ���050�8-� �340009 INNER ASIA �6 ( �0 �4) �09–��3 brill.com/inas Inner ASIA Book Reviews Doris Wastl-Walter (ed.) The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies. Farnham: Ashgate. 2011. 728 pp. Hardback £100.00. ISBN: 978-0-7546-7406-1 Thomas M. Wilson & Hastings Donnan (eds.) A Companion to Border Studies. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 2012. 636 pp. Hardback £120.00. ISBN: 978-1-4051-9893-6 Border Companions: Navigating Complex Borderlands In the 1990s Ohmae (1996), Appadurai (2003) and others saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union as harbingers of a new ‘borderless world’. These premature and overly optimistic forecasts were much criticised by scholars in geography, anthropology and other disciplines. Ó Tuathail (2000: 142) rightly dismissed them as ‘sweepingly superficial repre- sentations of the complexity of boundaries, territory and the world map’, while Elden (2005) argued that globalisation is not necessarily coextensive with deterritorialisation, and that the changes have been scalar rather than indica- tive of the demise of the nation-state. Far from ‘borderless’, the last decade has in fact witnessed an increase in the number of state borders. This increase was accompanied, and sharply so post 9/11, by a veritable proliferation of wall- building exercises (Brown 2010) as well as ever more sophisticated infrastruc- tures of surveillance. Unsurprisingly, the field of border studies has witnessed a similar explosion over the last decade. Long the remit of political geographers, border studies have gained prominence in many other fields. In anthropology, sociology and cognate disciplines, ethnographies and local studies of margins and borders (Das & Poole 2004) have done much to enrich the field of border studies. The subsequent efflorescence of border-themed publications and conferences has now become so vast as to be virtually unmanageable. The multitude of case studies has also demonstrated the difficult, perhaps even impossible, task of theorising borders as a single phenomenon. With historical, cultural and geopolitical contexts that rarely dovetail or overlap, borders have proven