Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: Borders came into global focus during the last decades of the twentieth century. The reason for this was the large-scale geographical, political, and societal changes that took place in Europe, for example, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the formation of the European Union, and the gathering momentum of global migration movements. These large-scale changes permanently altered the characteristics and significance of national borders in Europe. Instead of being boundaries of strict separation, borders became flexible gateways and pronounced areas of interaction and negotia tion. Furthermore, the large-scale changes which were being experienced had a strong impact on the lives of individuals in various borderlands. They altered the way that individuals and groups of people, whose lives were affected by the presence of borders, defined their identities. Since the establishment of the modern nation states, the rhetoric that constructs national unity and the socalled national culture has confined identities and cultures to specific, clearly bounded geographical areas (Malkki 1992). From this point of view, emigrants and refugees appeared simply as dislocated people and as ‘the others’ to the dominating national cultures and societies (Hammar-Suutari 2009; Ronkainen 2009; Davydova 2009). Today, due to global migration and the opening of national borders, the need to construct identities on different bases has become necessary. New identities are not necessarily confined to a place, region, or ethnicity. Instead, they are constructed in relation to borders and movements across them (Alvarez 1995; Paasi 2002). Since the beginning of the so-called topic of border studies in the 1980s, the focus of research has mainly concentrated on national borders, cross-border cooperation and border practices. In these approaches where geography, history and social sciences have dominated research, the border has been understood mostly as a tangible and political entity. Cultural borders, on the other hand, have featured in humanities research since the late 19th century. One of the
Authors: Tuulikki Kurki, Kirsi Laurén
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2326207402