This book provides a pre-history of Russia's war on Ukraine and Europe’s relations to it, illuminating the deep roots of the EU’s neighbourhood crisis as well as the migration crises it created in the last decade. To do so, the book employs a new and innovative framework that allows for a comprehensive, yet nuanced analysis of borders and a more cogent interpretation of their socio-political consequences.
Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship the book analytically examines the key common elements of borderscapes and links them in related arrays to allow for nuanced evaluation of both their particular and cumulative effects, as well as interpretation of their overall consequences, particularly for issues of identities and orders. The book offers a significant conceptual and theoretical advance, providing a transferable conceptualization of borderscape to guide research, analysis, and interpretation. Drawing on the author’s experience in policy, practice and academia, it also makes a methodological contribution by pushing the boundaries of reflexivity in interpretive International Relations (IR) research. Analyzing three main sites in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the book challenges conventional critical wisdom on EU bordering in the Schengen zone, at its external frontiers, and in its Eastern neighborhood. In so doing, it sheds new light on the post-communist transitions as well as the contemporary politics of CEE. It also shows how European Union bordering and its relations to identities and orders created great benefits for many Europeans, but also hindered the lives of many others and became self-defeating. This book is a must-read for scholars, students, and policy-makers, interested in a better understanding of Critical Border Studies (CBS) in particular, and International Relations in general. It will also appeal to anyone interested in CEE or wishing to get a deeper understanding of Russia’s war and the fight for Europe’s future.
Author(s): Benjamin Tallis
Series: Frontiers in International Relations
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 275
City: Cham
Preface
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Identities, Borders and Orders in Central and Eastern Europe
1.1 Research Questions
1.1.1 Main Questions
1.1.2 Subsidiary Questions
1.2 Book Contributions and Chapter Outline
1.3 Chapter Outline
References
Chapter 2: Conceptualising the Borderscape
2.1 Over-generalisation and Over-specification
2.1.1 Conceptualising the Borderscape
2.2 Constituting the Borderscape: A Framework for Analysis (& Representation)
2.2.1 Features, Discourses and Practices
2.3 Distinguishing and Contextualising the Borderscape: An Interpretive Framework
2.3.1 Distinguishing a Borderscape: The Intersection of (In)Security and (Im)Mobility
2.3.2 Contextualising the Borderscape: Identities-Borderscapes-Orders
2.4 Socio-political Underpinnings of the Borderscape
2.4.1 Mobilising Security in Word and Deed
2.4.2 Power, Resistance and the Limits of the Social
2.5 Spatialities of the Borderscape
2.5.1 Space and Subjectivity
2.5.2 Performative Placemaking
2.5.3 Territory and Materiality
2.5.4 Space/Power/Knowledge
2.6 Temporalities and Particularities of the CEE Borderscape
2.6.1 A Particular Europe
2.6.2 Historicism at the End of History
2.6.3 Histories´ Ends
2.6.4 Memory Contra History?
2.7 The Conceptualised Borderscape: Analysable, Interpretable, Researchable
References
Chapter 3: Interpretively Researching the CEE Borderscape
3.1 Elements of an Interpretive Methodology
3.2 A Particular Research Journey
3.2.1 From Dissatisfied Practitioner to Critical Academic
3.2.2 From Critical Academic to Post-critical Researcher
3.3 Mapping the Borderscape
3.3.1 Mapping an Emerging Concept
3.3.2 Mapping Sites, Actors and Settings
3.3.3 Conducting Interpretive Research
3.3.4 Research Skills, Phases and Sensibilities
3.3.5 Deskwork Methods
3.3.6 Fieldwork Methods
3.4 Reflexive, Post-critical Interpretive Research
3.4.1 Negotiating Access, Negotiating Proximity
3.4.2 Sense(s) of Doubt
References
Chapter 4: A Diverse Archipelago: Borderscape Features
4.1 Firewalls: Internal Control in a Schengen State
4.1.1 Mobile Police Controls
4.1.2 Inconvenient, But Not Oppressive Bureaucracy
4.2 Shadows: Bordering Between Schengen States
4.2.1 Shadow Policing at Intra-Schengen Frontiers
4.2.2 Twilight Zones
4.3 A Filter (Not a Fortress)
4.3.1 Border Constructions
4.3.2 Local Border Traffic
4.4 The Visa `Curtain-Wall´
4.4.1 Consular Remote-Control
4.4.2 Behind the Curtain-Wall: 2nd Class Europe
4.5 Twisted Mirrors: EU Bordering in Ukraine
4.5.1 Externalised Border Mirrors
4.5.2 Twisted Mirrors in an Uncanny Borderland
4.6 A Diverse Archipelago of Border Features
References
Chapter 5: Euro-renovations: Borderscape Discourses
5.1 An Area of Freedom, Security and Justice
5.1.1 Freedom: Mobility in Security
5.1.2 Justice: Ruling and Bounding
5.2 From Hierarchy to Belonging
5.2.1 Hierarchy: EU Members but Non-core Europeans?
5.2.2 Belonging: Enacting Political Subjectivity in the EU
5.3 Shared Values and Shared Interests in the EU´s Eastern Neighbourhood
5.3.1 Shared Values Among a `Ring of Friends´
5.3.2 Shared Interests: Friends with Benefits?
5.4 Justifying Division Through Divergent Values and Interests
5.4.1 Different Standards, Different Values
5.4.2 Divergent Interests: Justifying Bordering, Delineating Belonging
5.5 Threats and Fears: Discursively Securitising Ukraine
5.5.1 Threats of Difference: Organised Crime and Disorganised Migration
5.5.2 Fears of the East: The Devils in Western Minds
5.6 Discursive `Euro-Renovations´ in EU-Ukraine Relations
References
Chapter 6: Limiting Europe: Borderscape Practices
6.1 Europeanising: Capacity Without Community
6.1.1 Europeanising National Frontiers
6.1.2 Limits to Europeanisation
6.2 Knowing: Risk Analysis and the Distortion of EU Bordering
6.2.1 Risk Analysis as Dominant Mode of Border Knowledge
6.2.2 Opportunity Cost: Limitations of Risk Analysis
6.3 Protecting: Borders and Migrants
6.3.1 Protecting the Border
6.3.2 Protecting Migrants, Limiting Mobilities
6.4 Facilitating: Formal and Informal Ways In
6.4.1 Formal Facilitations: Privileges
6.4.2 Informal Facilitations: Negotiations
6.5 Moving: CEE Mobilities Within and Without the EU
6.5.1 Movement Within the EU and the Schengen Zone
6.5.2 Movement Between the EU and Ukraine
6.6 Border Practices as Limits to European Potential
References
Chapter 7: Conclusion: A Moveable East and the EU´s Unfulfilled Potential
7.1 EU Borderings, Identities and (Dis)Orders in CEE
7.1.1 EU-European Order and Identity
7.1.2 Eastern-European Order and Identity
7.1.3 (In)Security, (Im)mobilty and (Dis)Order: The EU´s Multiple Crises
7.2 From Crises to Opportunities: Future (Research) Directions
References
Chapter 8: Epilogue: Europe Through the Prism of Russia´s War on Ukraine
8.1 Epilogue
8.2 Mobility: A Tale of Two Crises (and a Visa Liberalisation)
8.2.1 Crisis: 2013-2016
8.2.2 Freer Movement, for Some: 2016-2021
8.2.3 A Different Crisis, a Different Response: 2022
8.3 EU Dis-Ordering: Forsaking Creative Geopolitics, Transformative Power and Progressive Security
8.3.1 Losing Their Religion: A Less Inspired, Less Clear-Eyed, Less Capable EU
8.3.2 The Rise of Protective Security and the Fall of Progressive EU Ordering
8.4 (Non-core) Europe: CEE as the EU´s (Re-)Moveable East?
8.4.1 The Return of Non-core Europe?
8.4.2 The EU´s Core Problem
8.5 Twilight at Dawn: Neo-Idealism, Embracing Ukraine and UnCancelling EUrope´s Future
8.5.1 The New, Hard-Edged Idealism and Its Opponents
8.5.2 EUrope´s Identities, Borderscapes and Orders
8.5.3 UnCancelling the Future: The EU Can Rise Again Its East
References
Appendix A: List of Fieldwork Activities and Fieldwork Reference Key
Fieldwork Activities: Czech Site
Fieldwork Activities: Polish Site
Fieldwork Activities: Ukrainian Site
Appendix B: List of Acronyms
