Download the paper here 👇
🔗 borderlab.eu/policy-paper...

#EurAsianBorderLab #BorderStudies #MigrationPolicy #EULaw #Asylum

Drawing on insights from border studies, our latest policy paper tries to interpret the new Pact, revealing how it codifies practices first introduced during crisis moments – rapid screening, containment zones, and probabilistic filtering – into the permanent architecture of EU border governance.

When the river moves, someone has to decide if the border moves with it or stays put. There’s nothing automatic about any of it.

What other “natural” boundaries have we convinced ourselves are inevitable?🤔

📸Pillandia
#EurAsianBorderLab #BorderStudies #NaturalBorders #Rivers #Geopolitics

What’s really happening when we call a border “natural” is that we’re hiding a political choice behind geography. It makes a human decision look like geographic inevitability. But someone still chose which river, and someone decided whether the line runs down the middle or along one bank.

When China and Russia nearly went to war over a river island in 1969, it was partly because the Ussuri kept moving the border between them. They finally settled it in 2004 by agreeing to divide the island, but the river🌊 hasn’t stopped shifting.

In 1864, a flood cut off a chunk of Mexico and attached it to Texas. For over a century, the two countries argued over whether El Chamizal belonged to Mexico (because that’s where it started) or the US (because that’s where the river now ran).

Replacing passport stamps with digital records, the system will collect biometric and personal data, marking a major step toward the full digitisation of Europe’s external borders.

🔗https://borderlab.eu/estonia-news/estonia-and-eu-to-introduce-new-digital-entry-exit-system-ees-from-october-12/

🔗Read the full essay: borderlab.eu/blog/borderi...

#EurAsianBorderLab #BorderStudies #VolumetricBorders #Identity

The review team noted this essay was so deeply personal that conventional theoretical frameworks would have destroyed what it accomplishes. Identity here is volumetric, layered, and beautifully contradictory, expanding across generations and geographies in ways that refuse simple categorisation.

This moment sits at the heart of Mia’s essay, now published as our second runner-up from the volumetric borders contest. The essay moves between her father’s 1979 refugee journey🌊 and her mother’s 2005 gender-expectation rebellion. Mia herself is in between...

Check out the essay if you haven’t 👇
borderlab.eu/blog/bodies-...

#EurAsianBorderLab #BorderStudies #GlobalHealth #DigitalHealth #VolumetricBorders

Gwen Petrina Latenri Tappu, runner-up in our Volumetric Borders essay contest, shows how healthcare🏥 apartheid emerges from the intersection of biological, digital, and geopolitical barriers. Through her essay, she reveals how bodies themselves become border zones.

This logic runs deep in everyday healthcare. Electronic records privilege some symptoms and identities while erasing others. Telemedicine expands access only for those with digital literacy and stable connections...💻

The issue emerges from our 2024 symposium and examines how ordinary people in borderlands create practical strategies for survival through everyday actions and local knowledge.

🔗 borderlab.eu/news/first-a...

#EurAsianBorderLab #BorderStudies #SpecialIssue #BorderlandVernaculars

This is the first article🥳 from our upcoming special issue “Borderland vernaculars: Coping, resilience, and action in times of crisis,” edited by Lab members Karin Dean, Jussi P. Laine, and Raili Nugin.

Her closing poem is even more haunting💔: “My name is missing from the dropdown menu, my wound too blurred for the algorithm. They ask for proof of body, but I am already a border.”

🔗Read the full essay: borderlab.eu/blog/bodies-...
#EurAsianBorderLab #BorderStudies #VolumetricBorders #GlobalHealth