Publications

This essay explores different maps of Ukraine and map-related activities carried out in Ukraine in 2022 and 2023 after the start of the Russian invasion, including among others maps of Ukrainian cultural losses, air raid alerts, and the defence of Kyiv as well as a flash mob setting a record in drawing maps of Ukraine. To do so, the essay applies a semiotic approach and draws on the Peircean typology of signs. By focusing on the ways selected maps of Ukraine relate to the diverse messages they convey, in addition to conventional icon maps the essay distinguishes symbol maps, index maps as well as maps combining indexicality and symbolism. Based on the analysis of new meanings and functions that the map of Ukraine has gained since 2022, the essay argues that the indexicality and symbolic weight of these maps have grown. The essay concludes that in the context of the ongoing war, the map of Ukraine has become increasingly present in the everyday life of Ukrainian citizens as an important element of the daily wartime routine of receiving updates, consuming news and communicating with colleagues, family and friends.

Since geopolitical crises accelerate migration from warzones or places of forced cultural homogeneity, we can notice an increasing meaning of borders today in a changing society, not only in Western but also in Eastern Europe and in-between. At the same time, findings from interdisciplinary border research emphasize precarious phenomena of ‘uncertainty’ or ‘in-between-ness’ and hybridity, suggesting that borders have a ‘liminal quality’. In the emblematic case study on re/bordering at the German–Polish borderland, traits of a renaissance of the border and territorial un/certainty, mean irritation in space, cultures, and forms of belonging. In developing discursive practices in time such as symbolic and socio-spatial phenomena of demarcation, exclusion, and transformation, this report refers to empirical phenomena like the “Rosary to the border” and “LGBT-free zones” in Poland or the “Willkommenskultur” in Germany. It juxtaposes interpretive reciprocal patterns of borders, like ‘fear’ and ‘irony’ that weave a tapestry of un/certainty. These examples show how the Polish–German borderland is affected by re/bordering practices without necessarily being geographically close to it and therefore show its liminal quality. 

The succession of rebordering shocks that occurred in recent years raises questions about the implications of these (geo)political events for cross-border cooperation. Based on the premise that special attention should be paid to the evolution of ideas pertaining to borders as a forerunner of significant policy changes, this paper seeks to show the extent to which the reintroduction of temporary border controls between Sweden and Denmark since 2015 has changed the meaning cross-border cooperation stakeholders give to the national border crossing the Öresund region. In order to identify ideational shifts in the mindset of cross-border cooperation actors, the multiplicity of meanings concerning borders is captured according to a relational perspective using semantic network analysis. In doing so, an innovative method is proposed. The comparative analysis of actors' collective mental representations of the border in 2014 and 2021 allows us to show the impact of rebordering shocks. If the connecting role of the border is now considered marginal, the opportunities it is likely to represent for the Öresund region's economic growth are still relevant. Moreover, the recognition of a common regional identity also appears to have been strengthened. In the meantime, the idea that the border could be a source of conflict has gained momentum. The increasing recognition of the ambivalence of the border reminds us that a crisis is often a source of new challenges, but also of opportunities.

This paper explores the symbolic significance of national borders in a cross-border regional context. The main argument is that the transformation of borders is actually part of a complex and contested process of symbolisation, predicated on articulations between political projects, everyday experience, and collective memories. The Greater Geneva borderscape provides an emblematic case of cross-border cooperation that is marked by the physical erasure of the Franco-Swiss border. Rather than an absence of symbolisation, we hypothesise that the border continues to play a symbolic role through its implied “absence” in the affirmation of a cross-border territorial project. First, we show how the invisibilisation of the border in the Greater Geneva spatial imaginaries is in fact a symbolisation strategy aimed at underlining its obsolete character. Second, we reveal how the discordances between the symbolic recoding of the border by cross-border cooperation elites and existing popular imaginations and competing meanings weakens the project. To the extent that borders are powerful symbols that are intended to stimulate emotions and a sense of belonging, the ability to mobilise their meaning-making capacity is at the heart of symbolisation politics, as much for the proponents of open borders and cross-border cooperation as for the reactionary forces that emphasise national interests and ontological insecurity.