Search

The Russian and Soviet governments believed the border to be a social and political construct. They often described and considered it as a foreign policy issue and a point of military vulnerability. In the course of 70 years of Sino-Russian relations since 1949, the border turned from a porous imperial fringe to a line of defense, a zone of economic growth, and a zone of economic anxiety. Throughout this evolution process, the Russian central government failed to grant agency to the local authorities and indigenous communities. The article argues that the current Russian federal government entrusts the local government with two conflicting goals in the borderlands: building strong cross-border ties and maintaining a "strong vertical of power" with top-down management and absolute supremacy of national security matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The border is a place of encounter for geopolitical and literary accounts as well as historiographical and anthropological ones, but also is, like the doors guarded by the god Janus, a location where the dichotomy between control and integration--the paradox of globalization-- is apparent. All this may allow an informal measurement of relations between neighbors. This article will discuss the implementation, over 30 years, of border controls at the Chilean-Bolivian frontier through the deployment of one of the most aggressive policies seen in teichopolitics: mine-laying that resulted in a virtual wall between both countries. F inally, the reasons that led Chile in recent years to remove mines and reduce its control of the border will be analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an attempt to give an answer to the question: what are the consequences of the weakening factor of territorial belonging and how it in fact realizes in the Lithuanian-Polish-Belarusian borderland? In such a small territory as Lithuanian-Polish-Belarusian borderland it is possible to investigate two opposite, reciprocal processes: disappearances (the Lithuanian-Polish borderland) and strengthening of borders (the Lithuanian-Belarusian and Polish-Belarusian borderland). Borders as markers of division have different functions. Using a "boundary narrative" we will analyse such functions as "border-door", "borderwall", and "barrier". A method of a free narration about a life on border will allow to create the generalized image of the inhabitant of a border zone, its way of life and to reveal its peculiar features. These peculiar features we will analyse in the case of Lithuanian-Polish-Belarusian borderland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]