Chapter 2 Between the ‘Opening to the West’ and the Trauma of Rebordering

After the dissolution of the USSR, the new post-Soviet borders became a valuable research laboratory both for social scientists from the region and international scholars. Persisting Soviet legacies, on the one hand, and the continuing re-bordering processes in the post-Soviet space, on the other, make post-Soviet borders an object of enduring scholarly interest and constitute post-Soviet border studies as a specific research field. This chapter outlines the contours of this multidisciplinary field and seeks to map its main research institutions, projects, and publications in multiple political, geographic, and academic contexts. It identifies regional ‘schools’ of border studies in the post-Soviet space as well as their origins. The chapter argues that the institutionalisation of border studies in the post-Soviet context has been closely connected, first, to the new geopolitical imaginaries of the post-Cold War era and, second, to some important paradigmatic shifts in social sciences that arrived in post-Soviet academia in the 1990s

Chapter 2 Between the ‘Opening to the West’ and the Trauma of Rebordering

After the dissolution of the USSR, the new post-Soviet borders became a valuable research laboratory both for social scientists from the region and international scholars. Persisting Soviet legacies, on the one hand, and the continuing re-bordering processes in the post-Soviet space, on the other, make post-Soviet borders an object of enduring scholarly interest and constitute post-Soviet border studies as a specific research field. This chapter outlines the contours of this multidisciplinary field and seeks to map its main research institutions, projects, and publications in multiple political, geographic, and academic contexts. It identifies regional ‘schools’ of border studies in the post-Soviet space as well as their origins. The chapter argues that the institutionalisation of border studies in the post-Soviet context has been closely connected, first, to the new geopolitical imaginaries of the post-Cold War era and, second, to some important paradigmatic shifts in social sciences that arrived in post-Soviet academia in the 1990s

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

La ‘questione russa’ nel dibattito intellettuale e politico dell’Ucraina del post-Majdan

This paper provides an analysis of the intellectual and political debate around the role of Russian language and culture in post-Maidan Ukraine. The author retraces (a) the main social and cultural developments emerged in Ukraine in the aftermath of the Euromajdan Revolution (2013-14) and the war in Donbas (2014-), and (b) the directions of cultural policies promoted by the post-Majdan elite (2014-19). Through this twofold reading the article shows the peculiar interrelation between the field of culture and the field of politics in contemporary Ukraine, in an attempt to reveal the specific nuances of the so-called ‘Russian question’