The University of San Diego's Trans-Border Institute (TBI) promotes lasting peace in Mexico and in the border region, through applied research, innovative educational practices and cross-border partnerships. For twenty years, the TBI has been a source of information on cross-border issues and the relations between Mexico and the United States. The TBI publishes data from surveys and reports on police reforms, arms trafficking and the application of the immigration laws.
The Centre for Border Region Studies in the University of Southern Denmark, in Sønderborg (founded in 2016, based on a research tradition dating back to 1976), links the Faculty of Human Sciences and the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences for interdisciplinary and comparative research work using qualitative methods. Specifically, the disciplines represented for research in the field of European cross-border regions are anthropology, geography, history and political sciences.
The research themes are structured using four fields as indicated by the Centre for Border Region Studies:
The role and developing functions of borders and cross-border regions
Current cross-border European regions: conflicts and cooperation
The role of (cross-border) regions and of the European Union
Universities in the European border regions are facing special challenges due to their geographic location. These challenges may also be viewed as opportunities. Political representatives from the border regions confirm their willingness to engage in stronger European integration in the areas of education and research. In fact, the spatial proximity facilitates international research cooperation, student exchange in general and creation of special coordinated bi- and trinational study programs. The site also leads to special research topics in subjects such as economics, law, literature and cultural sciences. These can be processed by scientists on either side of the border. The quality of personal contact turns out to be supporting pillar for innovative border-crossing programs in all areas..
In this book, geopolitical experts from different countries provide important information on border landscapes thereby enabling us to get a deeper understanding of certain aspects of cultural landscapes. The political border represents a spatial limit to the political organisation of territories. But the way in which these borders are used and perceived can have an effect on the landscape.
This article focuses on a crucial but neglected aspect of borders in Europe’s changing borders: the role of citizens in envisioning, constructing, maintaining and erasing borders. Borderwork is very much the business of citizens, of ordinary people. They are the one involved in constructing, experiencing and contesting them throughout Europe on any spatial scale from the geopolitical to the local. Our everyday life is subject to securisation. From checkpoints outside supermarkets, the use of credit cards while shopping, we face different kinds of borders.
The temptation to abolish borders corresponds to a desire to kill off a myth, but it neglects the fact that the border, with its four functions of translation, regulation, differentiation and relationship, is a living notion in society. The rediscovery by Brazil of its land borders, like the problems that are arising on this question in the States of what used to be Eastern Europe, show that the relationship function can only be exercised in an active, stable and non-conflictual way if the other functions are fulfilled. A border is the measure of pluralism against the dangers of chaos; it serves as much to "express" order as it does disorder.
The development of the Øresund region thanks to the bridge linking Copenhagen and Eastern Denmark to Southern Sweden has been considered as a model for the construction of a European region. Based on a multidisciplinary project, this article takes the Øresund case as its starting point, and provides a few contradictory examples from Scandinavia. The objective is to discuss regions strive to make themselves visible and attractive to investor and visitors, but above all to determine to what extent they produce regional players who actively create integration through different activities and contacts at the borders. The emphasis is placed on the cultural dimensions that we find in everyday practices and the symbolic manifestations of these transnational processes.
This study is an opportunity to analyse the consequences (for the citizen) of the setting up of space that is a genuine cross-border space as regards access to maternity care. It also underscores the importance of health cooperation in the Greater Region in order to avoid having areas of vulnerability. The examples studied in this regional space provide useful information for decision-makers in terms of territorial development. The analysis underscores the importance health cooperation based on collaboration at different levels: administrative, economic and technical, but also cultural in order to determine whether such an approach is feasible.
This article aims at evaluating the democratic status and prospects of the strategic, institutional and cooperative level within CBRs, based on a case study of the Øresund Region, situated on the border between Denmark and Sweden, and complemented with secondary evidences from other CBRs. The following questions are asked:
Do the strategies promoted have a democratic scope?
Are institutions reasonably accountable, in a traditional sense, to citizen within the region?
Is the concrete cooperation inclusive of broad categories of citizens?
The aim of the book is to show what means exist to soften borders and avoid the discrimination and marginalisation that separation can generate. To extend the debate, the book draws on the theoretical framework of social ecology. Social ecology is concerned with the complex relations between nature and society and seeks to provide perspectives by showing how environmental issues are dependent on the social context.
