Between security and mobility: negotiating a hardening border regime in the Russian-Estonian borderland

Since the end of the Cold War order post-Soviet borders have been characterised by geopolitical tensions and divergent imaginations of desirable political and spatial orders. Drawing upon ethnographic research in two border towns at the Russian-Estonian border, the article makes a case for a grounded examination of these border dynamics that takes into account how borders as sites of ‘mobility and enclosure’ are negotiated in everyday life and shaped by the differentiated incorporations of statecraft into people’s lives. Depending on their historical memories, people interpret the border either as a barrier to previously free movement or as a security device and engage in correspondingly different relations to the state – privileging local concerns for mobility or adopting the state’s concerns over security and sovereignty. Analysing these border negotiations and the relations between citizens and the state, articulated in people’s expectations and claims, can provide us with a better understanding of how people participate in the making of borders and contribute to the stability and malleability of political orders

Nested peripherialisation: remaking the East-West border in the Russian-Estonian borderland

The break-up of the Cold War order, the eastwards expansion of the European Union into former socialist countries and the more recent economic and humanitarian crises have led to the emergence of new symbolic borders and the reconfiguration of spatial hierarchies within Europe. The article shows how metageographical categories of “Europe”, “East” and “West” and underlying classificatory logics are not only circulated in geopolitical discourses but can be appropriated by ordinary citizens in their everyday life. Using the Russian-Estonian border as a case study, the article examines the recursive negotiations of Europe’s East-West border by people living in the borderland as a response to the geopolitical changes. It highlights three border narratives – the narrative of becoming peripheral/Eastern, the narrative of becoming European, and a narrative contesting the East-West hierarchy by associating the East and one's own identity with positive things. On both sides of the border, the status as a new periphery does not create unity across the border but rather results in multiple and competing border narratives, in which “Europe” functions as an unstable referent in relation to which one’s position is marked out. This “nested peripherialisation” at Europe's new margins reflects power relations and uneven local experiences of transformation

Between Russia and Estonia: narratives of place in a new borderland

The Russian-Estonian border has undergone radical changes in the past two decades - from an integrated borderland between two Soviet republics to a border between nation-states and the new EU external border. Until the present day, it is a discursive battlefield that reflects the difficult relations between Russia and Estonia after the restoration of Estonia's independence. While much research has concentrated on antagonistic projects of identity politics and state-building from a top-down perspective, this paper asks how people living in the borderland make sense of the place they live in and negotiate shifts in the symbolic landscapes. Based on life-story narratives of Russian-speakers, it analyzes different ways of narrating and framing place and argues for a consideration of the plurality and ambivalences of place-making projects on the ground. Furthermore, it argues for a more balanced account of continuity and discontinuity in memory narratives by taking into account how the socialist past continues to be meaningful in the present. As the interviews show, memories of the socialist past are used for constructing belonging in the present both by countering and by reproducing national narratives of boundedness

Borderland memories. The remaking of the Russian-Estonian frontier

The border between Russia and Estonia has undergone significant changes in the past two and a half decades from a border between two Soviet republics to an international border and external EU border. In the public discourse and the scholarly literature, this border has been characterised as a battlefield shaped by divergent geopolitical visions and evaluations of the shared past. While Estonia has sought to distance itself from Russia and condemns the Soviet past as an occupation, Russia derives pride from its historical role in liberating Europe in World War II and continues to hold on to positive memories of the Soviet past and its role in the Baltic states. The thesis looks at how these official narratives have been negotiated locally in the once united border towns of Narva and Ivangorod in the Russian-Estonian borderland. Based on an extended fieldwork stay and the analysis 58 life-story interviews with people living on both sides of the border, it examines how people living in the borderland position themselves in the context of shifting narrative and structural frameworks. How do they re-evaluate the relations to the other side and reconsider their memories of the shared past? In examining these questions, the thesis seeks to make two general contributions to existing literature: it brings together the fields of border studies and memory studies to explore the reconfiguration of both temporal and spatial orderings in the making of a border. Secondly, it outlines a model for studying border change that focuses on the interrelations between the vernacular and the official level. The first part of the thesis looks at the politics of temporal orderings in the borderland and explores how people belonging to different ethnic groups and generations remember the past in the context of changing borders. It shows how people in part reproduce the polarised narratives mobilised at the official level but also how local experiences and generational change lead to a diversification of temporal orderings. The second part of the thesis explores the politics of spatial orderings in post-socialist memories. It looks at how by remembering the past people both reproduce and undermine borders; it demonstrates that it is not simply the memories of a shared past but also new inequalities following the establishment of the border that shape the ways in which people relate to their cross-border neighbours. Overall, the thesis provides a complex and differentiated account of border change in which different temporalities and spatialities at the vernacular and official levels can interact, interrelate and stand in opposition to each other. It shows that although people living in the borderland experience constraints and even powerlessness in the face of changes in the border, they have an active role in negotiating the changes and develop multiple responses to official narratives. It demonstrates how by appropriating official narratives and relating them to their own purposes, people articulate local concerns and make claims for belonging, recognition and state care in the face of the changes

“…actually we are deeply rooted in Austria”. National identity constructions and historical perceptions of young people with migration background in Austria

“…actually we are deeply rooted in Austria”. National identity constructions and historical perceptions of young people with migration background in Austri

Narratives of peripheralisation: place, agency and generational cohorts in post-industrial Estonia

Research on spatial polarisation in Central and Eastern Europe has tended to focus on macro-economic processes that create certain places and people as peripheral and has highlighted the socioeconomic impact of peripheralisation, while paying only limited attention to local experiences and responses. Drawing on a multiscalar conception of peripheralisation processes, the article examines the making of socio-spatial inequalities from the perspective of the periphery and foregrounds the narrative practices through which actors negotiate peripheralisation processes focusing on the case of Narva, a former industrial city in Estonia’s Northeastern region. In the face of negative structural dynamics actors rework their peripheral status by articulating a positive sense of belonging, claiming recognition based on their work and trying to exert control over their futures. The paper particularly highlights generational differences within these narrative responses to spatial inequalities. While older working-class populations’ narratives are shaped by collective and place-based resilience, the post-socialist generation employs more individualised strategies in the face of peripheralisation and exercises agency by detaching themselves from place. Analysing these responses, the article draws attention to constrained agency as well as cultural differentiation within peripheral communities

Tourism and the dynamics of transnational mnemonic encounters

The turn towards transnational memory has largely focused on particular sites and modes of remembering, focusing on the creation of memories between and beyond nation-states in institutional politics, the media, migration and to a lesser degree social movements. Despite its significance for encountering other people’s past, international tourism remains under-examined in the scholarship due to a focus on macro-developments, a polarisation along a binary of cosmopolitan vs conflictive memories and a discounting of memories shaped by commercialised logics. Drawing on a case study of Russian tourism in Tallinn, Estonia, this paper makes the case for a closer examination of tourist encounters as part of research on transnational memory. It examines how tourism works as an arena for the production and circulation of memories through direct transnational encounters, refracting and modifying macro-political memories within a commercialised service environment. We analyse the role of tour guides as mnemonic intermediaries and show how in their work with Russian tourists they navigate pasts that form the subject of on-going memory conflicts at the level of international politics. Their representational strategies deemphasise contested pasts and avoid conflicts through neutrality and compromise. At the same time tourist encounters can also be used to create spaces for dialogue and the formation of positive relations. Overall the article demonstrates both the productivity and frictions of tourist settings for transnational remembering and makes the case for considering more ambiguous cases in transnational memory research

Solidarities outside the box

With constant news about growing Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, the rise of right-wing movements and parties across Europe and the world – the media is dominated by stories documenting and trying to understand our ‘age of anger’ as the essayist Pankai Mishra has called it in his recent book. Publicly displayed emotions of anger, anxiety and resentment have our attention. In a political climate shaped by uncertainty and competition, the social is increasingly understood in ethno-cultural-religious terms and the ability to live together in diversity is put in question. For example, a recent survey by the 2017 Aurora Humanitarian Index and reported in the Guardian found that ‘more than half of Britons believe their culture is threatened by ethnic minorities living in the UK’....

We are all displaced

Displacement marks our times. According to the UNHCR, there are currently 65.6 million people forcibly displaced worldwide. The New York Times ‘Refugees and displaced people’ section is filled with new articles about displacement in different regions of the world on an almost daily basis. At the same time, voices that problematise mobility and migration, not because of concerns with the plight of displaced populations, but out of protectionism and a desire to contain populations are becoming louder. The up- and unrooted are both considered suspect. ...

Between Security and Mobility: Negotiating a Hardening Border Regime in the Russian-Estonian Borderland

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on 27th Feb 2015, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2015.1015408Since the end of the Cold War order post-Soviet borders have been characterised by geopolitical tensions and divergent imaginations of desirable political and spatial orders. Drawing upon ethnographic research in two border towns at the Russian-Estonian border, the article makes a case for a grounded examination of these border dynamics that takes into account how borders as sites of ‘mobility and enclosure’ are negotiated in everyday life and shaped by the differentiated incorporations of statecraft into people’s lives. Depending on their historical memories, people interpret the border either as a barrier to previously free movement or as a security device and engage in correspondingly different relations to the state – privileging local concerns for mobility or adopting the state’s concerns over security and sovereignty. Analysing these border negotiations and the relations between citizens and the state, articulated in people’s expectations and claims, can provide us with a better understanding of how people participate in the making of borders and contribute to the stability and malleability of political orders