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

The Russian-U.S. Borderland: Opportunities and Barriers, Desires and Fears

The paper focuses on the Russia-U.S. cross-border area that lies in the Bering Sea region. Employing the concept of geographical proximity, I argue that the U.S.-Russian proximity works in a limited number of cases and for relatively few kinds of actors, such as companies supplying Chukotka with American goods, border guards conducting rescue operations, organizers of environmental projects and cruise tours, and aboriginal communities. The impressive territorial proximity between Asia and North America induces ambitious and sometimes widely advertised official and public desires of conquering the spatial divide, promoted by extreme travellers and planners of transcontinental tunnel or bridge projects. At the same time, cooperation is seriously hindered by limited economic potential of the Russian North-East, weakness of transportation networks, harsh climate, and pervasive alarmist sentiments on the Russian side of the border