Growing up less than two hours from an international border, I often had to deal with the inconvenience of passport checks, car lineups and nervous moments wondering if the border guard would pull the car over for a search. I never had any problem reaching the other side, but I was always a little wary of the rifles slung over the shoulders of guards who seemed so ready to shoot any hell-raisers back into the country where they belong. Until I crossed the arbitrary line, I had never seen a gun. Now, borders are always associated with violence for me.

When I found out I was going to Indonesia on a youth exchange program, I immediately opened an atlas, gazed at the 17,000 broken islands and wondered how those disjointed lands could provide a common patriotism to 250 million people. The impossibility of borders in these broken islands baffled me.

Benedict Anderson, an Indonesianist himself, famously wrote that “[the nation] is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” The very concept of drawing lines around ourselves—of including and excluding others — links us to people we have never met. This connection is so strong that the majority of wars in the last 200 years have been fought over these lines and atrocious acts of violence have been committed in order to redraw borders around people who see themselves as a distinct community. We name wars either international or civil, yet they are always based on power and control. When people are boxed into a certain country, like animals on a farm, they are inherently limited in their agency and freedom of movement. In a diverse country like Indonesia, which had been organized for thousands of years by geographical and cultural boundaries, border conflict was inevitable.

For the length of my exchange program I lived with an Indonesian counterpart. My counterpart came from the province of Aceh on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra. Her province was the site of a 31-year war of independence that only ended after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed 200,000 Acehnese, who make up about five percent of the population of the province. Aceh, which has never been colonized by the Dutch like most parts of Indonesia, has a distinct language and culture from the rest of the country and was vying for autonomy. Aceh is rich in resources and locals wanted control over their economic, social and political lives; thus the Free Aceh Movement, GAM, was established in 1976. In 1977,  they began a counter-insurgency movement against the Indonesian forces.  GAM was fighting for their right of representation, something I could barely relate to.

My counterpart told me stories of her father, whose car was bombed and who was chased by a member of the opposition forces with a knife in the Northeast of the province. She also told me of her friend whose hand was cut off in a village close to the city of Lhokseumawe because he refused to join the separatists. I had never encountered violence in such close proximity. Suddenly borders became bloody, and for the first time the machine guns that I had only seen on border guards were being used to hold a country together.

In 2005, a peace treaty was signed between GAM and the Indonesian government so that relief could be delivered to those affected by the tsunami. The treaty granted Aceh greater autonomy, and in 2006 the province held its first open elections. Aceh returned to peace, yet the arbitrary nature of the frontier remained.

My exchange program deeply affected me, yet the question of borders stayed with me the most. Why were my friend and I, who were more similar than many people I had met at home, divided by arbitrary lines? More importantly, why were people in her province dying in the name of representation? To draw yet another border that will separate them from the outside world? Writer Kate Harris said that “Borders at their most basic are desires written onto lands and lives — urges to know and be known, to belong to something bigger, to foist permanence on the fact of flux.” In Indonesia I felt the desire to create permanence in a land of flux, yet it was this drive that was killing people.

During my stay in Indonesia, I flew to Abu Dhabi for my Candidate Weekend, temporarily passing through another border to another world. While I was here I met students from around the world, yet nationality still seemed to be the largest determinant of our identity. When we met, our country of origin immediately followed our names, yet the very fact that we were here, together, in a single location demonstrated the flexibility of the fences we had built around ourselves. We have the power, as a united community, to melt borders and dissolve conflicts—no one here is fighting for power. Perhaps we are evidence that borders are softening, but we need to keep working to ensure that no person—ever—will need to die in the name of control. Only once every being has full autonomy and nations cease to exist will conflict stop.