Borders are celebrations of human diversity but also fault lines of human conflict, where national sovereignty, ethnic allegiances, history, and geography converge to form a thin strip of land that bears the burden of separating the vast differences between different groups of people. Today’s borders did not materialize out of nowhere. Every border has a story of formation, from old borders that we take for granted, such as that between France and Spain, to the newest of borders, such as the one drawn last year between Sudan and South Sudan. There are also borders that do not appear on the world map. Internal conflicts, such as the independence movement in Aden in southern Yemen, or the movement in the putative southern Indian state of Telangana to break off from Andhra Pradesh, occur within national borders. Other internal conflicts involve international borders, such as the efforts of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan to join with Armenia, or the dream of the Kurds in the mountains of the Middle East to carve out chunks of five different countries to form their own independent nation. This class will take you on a whirlwind tour of the most interesting places in the world and will cover everything from the monumental events that defined borders to cool trivia about border quirks, and will hopefully leave you with a new appreciation for the borders that define our world.