EUBORDERSCAPES - Bordering, Political Landscapes and Social Arenas: Potentials and Challenges of Evolving Border Concepts in a post-Cold War World

The project focused on the understanding, perception, experience and exploitation of state borders as social and political resources: “Recognising the close interrelationships between social change and paradigm shifts, the EUBORDERSCAPES project will analyse the evolving concept of borders in terms of a mutually linked emergence of “post-national”, “post-colonial”, “post-modernist” and “post-Cold War” strands of inquiry.” To do so, several political, social and methodological issues were combined. These included questions of territoriality, governance, solidarity, democracy, and legal bases of state sovereignty linked to the Schengen and non-Schengen EU and the external frontiers of the EU; socio-cultural dynamics that have an effect on the formation of borders; the parallel hardening of the EUs external borders and putting in place of new mechanisms for regional cooperation as well as the negotiations regarding the opening of regional economic spaces; the evolution and effects of everyday transnationalism, border-negotiating and –transcending; the consequences of processes of conceptual change on the production of geographical representations and knowledge; the “mapping” of borders; and the potential of borders.

The websites contains a project description (work package, partners and reports), a part on policy aspects, working papers, and a newsletter. The working papers offer timely insights on different topics such as conceptual issues in border studies, gender and intersectionality, migration and borders, Europe, borders and identity politics, local forms of cross-border co-operation, and the use of borders in conflict. All the working papers are available on the website.

Working papers

• Final Report
• Working Paper 1 Cathal McCall: Cross-Border Cooperation and Conflict Amelioration
• Working Paper 2 Nira Yuval-Davis: A Situated Intersectional Everyday Approach to the Study of Bordering
• Working Paper 3 Heidi Fichter-Wolf: Assessing Cultural-Spatial Change in European Border Areas - Theory-based Considerations in Developing an Understanding of Social (Re)Constructions of Space
• Working Paper 4 Kolosov and Scott: Selected Conceptual Issues in Border Studies
• Working Paper 5 Miika Tervonen:Re-conceptualizing the Finnish Eastern Border: a pilot study on discourses in Suomen Kuvalehti, 1990 – 2010
• Working Paper 6 Hans-Joachim Bürkner: Imaginaries: Post-Structuralist Readings of Bordering and Europeanization
• Working Paper 7 James W. Scott: Bordering, border politics and cross-border cooperation in Europe
• Working Paper 8 Pertti Joenniemi: City-twinning as Local Foreign Policy:The Case of Kirkenes-Nickel
• Working Paper 9 Frédéric Durand: Theoretical framework of the cross-border space production - the case of the Eurometropolis Lille - Kortrijk – Tournai
• Working Paper 10 Christophe Sohn: On borders’ multiplicity: A perspective from assemblage theory
• Working Paper 11 Bernhard Koeppen: The EU's internal market paradigm as de-bordering tool and dominant vision for Europe?
• Working Paper 12 Johan Schimanski: Changing Borders in Published Migration Narratives in Norwegian
• Working Paper 14 Krisztina Keresztély and James W. Scott: Roma Communities, Urban Development and Social Bordering in the Inner City of Budapest
• Working Paper 15 Tamar Arielli: Municipal Cooperation across Securitized Borders in the Post-Conflict Environment: The Gulf of Aqaba
• Working Paper 16 Miika Raudaskoski: From “between” to Europe: Remapping Finland in the post-Cold War Europe
• Working Paper 17 Frédéric DURAND and Thomas PERRIN: The “represented” borderscape of the Eurometropolis Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai: What interplay between cross-border integration and cross-border cooperation?

EUBORDERSCAPES was a large-scale research project, funded though the EU’s 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (total budget 6,9 Million Euros). The consortium included 22 partner institutions from 17 states, including several non-EU countries. Conceptual changes in the study of borders were tracked and interpreted.

The project consisted of 15 work packages (WP): conceptual change and the state of the debate (WP1), empirical frameworks (WP2), post-Soviet borders and conceptual change (WP3), Europeanisation: European integration and conceptual change (WP4), post-colonial bordering and Euro-African borderscapes (WP5), borders and critical geopolitics of neighbourhood (WP6), cross-Border co-operation as conflict amelioration (WP7), rebordering state spaces: cities, borders and integration processes (WP8), borders, intersectionality and the everyday (WP9), border-crossing and cultural production (WP10), fieldwork training and methodological development (WP11), case studies and fieldwork (WP12), cross-sectional and policy considerations (WP13), dissemination (WP14), management (WP15).