Eur-Asian Border Lab will be launched at Tallinn University

In the academic interdisciplinary field of border studies, bordering has become an increasingly complicated and nuanced conceptual process at the core of many key developments and processes in the world. Bordering is present in trans-national migration, global pandemics, sovereignty and aggression, surveillance and tracking, while it is conducted subtly through various language, education or identity politics. Yet public and policy-level understandings of bordering remain somewhat superficial: borders, often regulated by the state, are selectively closed off in the face of particular threats. 

The idea behind the Eur-Asian Border Lab is to combine the mainstream, Anglo-American dominated understandings in border studies and the thriving borderland research in Asia, to create trans-regional synergies and advance a multi-layered approach to understanding borders and bordering, and significantly, communicate this to the public, practitioners and policy-makers. In this, two top universities in the field of border studies will aid Tallinn University – the University of Eastern Finland and the University of Amsterdam. The Lab will also collaborate with the Global Borderlands Project at the American University of Central Asia. 
 
According to Karin Dean, the Eur-Asian Border Lab will become a platform that catalyses trans-regional conversations and synergies between the Euro-American and Asian border scholars. “The project opens multiple opportunities to unpack the shifting understanding of borders and cross-fertilize perspectives, ideas and methods across Europe and Asia. We also plan to reach out to policy-makers in a meaningful way. I hope that TLU’s institutional vanguard position will raise our research profile and capacity, while the intellectual and networking synergies will stimulate conceptually new research among all partners.”  

The Eur-Asian Border Lab will operate through online and offline activities. An international symposium and workshops with researchers and policy-makers, research stays at TLU by leading scholars, publishing of academic and policy papers, and a summer school in Asia are some of the activities. Furthermore, researchers and doctoral students from the three universities will embark on individual, paired and/or comparative pilot studies by adding volume, literally, to current understanding of bordering. They will investigate bordering across the increasingly volumetric and virtual spaces by unpacking the future-looking developments in bordering practices in air and sea, and the digital ecosystems re-shaping state and bordering in electronic spaces. Attracting and nurturing new early career researchers and strengthening research management and administration capacities are important aspects of the project. 

The cornerstone of the project is a complementarity in partnership. The University of Eastern Finland is among the world’s leading multidisciplinary research units studying the historical change in regions and various peripheral borderlands, the consequences of European integration and changes in Russia, and the practical challenges of cross-border interaction. It is also the longtime leader of the Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS), originally the US based and initiated scholarly network. Jussi Laine, the former ABS Executive Secretary and Treasurer, and its President, with substantial research on the EU borders and borders in theory, will lead the Finnish team. The University of Amsterdam is world-renowned for studying mobility and migration across Asian and European borders, and critically interrogating the construction of contemporary world regions in South, Southeast, East and Central Asia. Two of its researchers involved in the project, Tina Harris and Willem van Schendel, are among the initiators and organizers of Asian Borderlands Research Network (ABRN) and its conferences, and the editors of Amsterdam University Press’s Asian Borderlands Book Series.

The Tallinn University team studies borders uniquely from a multitude of different disciplines (geography, anthropology, political science, history, semiotics, philosophy, sociology) and regions (Asia, Europe/Estonia). They include Karin Dean (also the project coordinator), John Buchanan, Daniele Monticelli, Tauri Tuvikene, Raili Nugin, Kadri Kasemets, Tarmo Pikner, Alessandro Rippa, Uku Lember. The Eur-Asian Border Lab will also integrate the recently established CLUster on Bordering (CLUB) assembling researchers and the increasing number of MA/PhD students working on Asian borderlands who have been visiting TLU through various scholarships.

The Eur-Asian Border Lab is funded through the Horizon Europe Twinning programme for 3 years with €1,5 mil Euro.