EUBORDERSCAPES

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

The EUBORDERSCAPES project will study conceptual change in relation to fundamental social, economic, cultural and geopolitical transformations that have taken place in the past decades. In addition, major paradigmatic shifts in scientific debate, and in the social sciences in particular, will also be considered. State borders are the frame of reference, rather than ethnographic/anthropological boundaries. However, this approach emphasises the social significance and subjectivities of state borders while critically interrogating “objective” categories of state territoriality and international relations. The research proposed here will, furthermore, not only be focused at the more general, at times highly abstract, level of conceptual change. This approach will also allow us to compare and contrast how different and often contested conceptualisations of state borders (in terms of their political, social, cultural and symbolic significance) resonate in concrete contexts at the level of everyday life.

2012 – 2016

Radboud University Nijmegen/Nijmegen Centre for Border Research
Middle East Technical University/Centre for Black Sea and Central Asia (Turkey)
Institute of Geography-Russian Academy of Sciences
Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
University of Tromsø
Queen’s University Belfast
Ben Gurion University of the Negev
University Umea
University of Bergamo
Kharkhiv National University
Centre for Advanced Studies (Bulgaria)
Leibniz-Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning
Centre for Population, Poverty and Public Policy Studies (Luxembourg)
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique-Pacte (Francja) / Université Joseph Fourier (France)
Centre for Regional Studies (Hungary)
Centre for Independent Social Research (Russia)
University of Helsinki
University of East London
University of Eastern Finland (UEF) Karelian Institute