Routledge Handbook of European Borderlands: (Routledge International Handbooks)

The Routledge Handbook of European Borderlands revisits and reassesses the concept of borderlands in Europe, balancing case-specific perspectives with rich theoretical and conceptual avenues of research. The significance of the transformations after the fall of the Soviet Union made European borders central to the emergence of border studies as an emerging field of study, and since then, the financial crisis, rising migration, Brexit, and the Covid-19 pandemic have continued to make European borderlands a focus of research, national and international policy, media, and everyday concern. Bringing together a wealth of cross-cutting and empirically rigorous international scholarship, the handbook investigates European borderlands as spaces of encounter and political, social, and cultural change. This book depicts borderlands as both fundamentally relational and ambiguous products of fanciful geographical imagination, as well as real and lived places in which communities engage in different forms of integration, differentiation and contestation, at many levels of political, economic, geographic, and social interaction. Drawing on a range of different disciplinary perspectives, the handbook covers key topics such as security, migration, social inequality and justice, cross-border governance, cooperation and development, environmental threats, health and disease, and conflicts over citizenship, sovereignty, and territory. This handbook provides the perfect guide to understanding the multilayered complexities surrounding borderlands, and as such will be of interest to researchers across the fields of geography, politics, migration studies, international relations, anthropology, sociology, tourism, cultural studies, and European studies.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: European Borderlands as Arenas, Platforms and Mirrors of Transformation Section One: Borderlands of (In)security and Control 2. ‘Crisis’ in the Channel? Practices of Securitization and Epistemic Borderwork in the British/European Borderlands 3. Borderland Geopolitics: The Unsettledness of European Borders 4. Borderlands into Bloodlands, The Ukrainian-Russian Border and the End of the “Post-Soviet” 5. People as Weapons. Securitization, Moral Arguments and Nature on the EU-Belarus Border 6. European Border Bystanders: More than Human and more than European Border Stories 7. The Impact of the Covid-19 Crisis on Cross-Border Cooperation in Europe Section Two: Creativity, Cooperation and Resilience 8. The Finnish-Swedish Borderland as a Resilient Space of Cross-Border Relations 9. The Greater Region, or the Paradox of Cross-border Integration 10. The Galicia-Northern Portugal Euroregion as a Cooperative Borderland 11. Border Twin Cities in Europe: An Outline of the Phenomenon and Its Study 12. Collaborative Borderscaping; Using the Border as a Resource for Cross-Border Spatial Design 13. Bordering and Cross-Bordering at the Italy-France Frontier Section Three: Mashing and Clashing Sovereignties and Identities 14. Mashing and Clashing Sovereignties: How Brexit Was Conceived in the Irish Borderlands 15. Banal and Instrumental Brexitism in the Northern Ireland Borderlands 16. Imbricated Borderlands in the European Governance of Refugeehood 17. Populism and Borderlands: The Use of Spatial Objects in the Name of the People 18. From “Borderless World” to “Borders are Everywhere”. The Boundary Work of Refugees and Volunteers in Denmark after the “Return Turn” 19. The Danish-German Borderland Section Four: European Borderlands in (Post)Globalization 20. Hungary as a Borderland Nation 21. Borderlands Geo(ethno)politics at the EU’s External Frontiers: The Case of Transcarpathia 22. Turkey as a European Borderland: Syrian Displacement, Disaster and Security 23. Territorial Security Walls, Sovereignty, and the Reconstruction of the Nation-State 24. Whose Border, Which Crisis? Illiberalism and the (Re)nationalization of Poland’s Eastern Frontier, 2015-2022 25. Transboundary Nature Protection and National Parks in European Borderlands 26. The Shifting Significance of the Finnish-Russian Borderland

About the Author :
James W. Scott is Professor of Regional and Border Studies at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland, Finland. Thomas M. Wilson is Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University, State University of New York, USA.