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The border shifts and population exchanges between Central and East European states agreed at the 1945 Potsdam Conference continue to reverberate in the culture and politics of those countries. Focusing on Poland, this article proposes the term "border trouble" to interpret the politicized split in memory that has run through Polish culture since the end of the Second World War. Border trouble is a form of cultural trauma that transcends binaries of perpetrator/victim and oppressor/oppressed; it is also a tool for analyzing the ways in which spatial imagination, memory, and identity interact in visual and literary narratives. A close analysis of four recent feature films demonstrates the emergence of a visual grammar of cosmopolitan memory and identity in relation to borderland spaces. Wojciech Smarzowski's Róża ("Rose," 2011) and Agnieszka Holland's Pokot ("Spoor," 2017) are both set in territories that were transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945. Wołyń ("Volhynia," released internationally as "Hatred," 2016) and W ciemności ("In Darkness," 2011), also directed by Smarzowski and Holland respectively, are set in regions that were under Polish administration before the war but were transferred to Soviet Ukraine in 1945. All four productions break new ground in the memorialization of the post-war legacy in Poland. They deconstruct hitherto dominant discourses of simultaneity and ethnic homogeneity, engaging in Poland's wars of symbols as a third voice: anti-nationalist, but also refusing to essentialize cosmopolitan identity. They show the evolution of border trouble in response to contemporary political and cultural developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of the special cluster titled Bukovina and Bukovinians after the Second World War: (Re)shaping and (re)thinking a region after genocide and 'ethnic unmixing', guest edited by Gaëlle Fisher and Maren Röger.This introductory essay provides an overview of the historiography of the borderland region of Bukovina after 1945 and 1989–1991. Presenting the approaches adopted in different national contexts after the end of the Second World War, it points to the methodological nationalism which characterized research on the region during the Cold War. We show that while the historiography of Bukovina on the ground, in Romania and the Soviet Union, refracted wider national ideologies, abroad, particularly in West Germany and Israel, it remained for a long time the prerogative of small groups of "Bukovinians," who saw it as their "lost home." We explore both the similarities and differences between these narratives and stakeholders as well as the changes that took place after 1989–1991, especially in Romania and Ukraine. We show that while divided, the actors behind the narratives and thereby the narratives themselves have been connected in complex ways over the decades and particularly since the collapse of communism. Indeed, while for a long time the study of Bukovina resisted transnationalism, it nevertheless constituted and constitutes an ultimately transnational research object. Today, Bukovina remains a space of contest but it is also a space of opportunity, not least for researchers interested in the contested histories of borderland regions. This essay therefore contextualizes the themes and issues addressed in the following cluster of articles and identifies avenues for future research in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil wars have a tendency to spread across borders. In several instances of conflict diffusion, however, conflicts spread well after their cessation at home. Whereas existing diffusion research has not attached much importance to this observation, I argue that these conflicts are instances of a broader pattern of postconflict diffusion. Wars are particularly prone to spread after termination because the end of fighting generates a surplus of weapons, combatants, and rebel leaders whose fortunes are tied to the continuation of violence. Some of these resources circulate throughout the region via the small arms trade and through transnational rebel networks, making this a time at which it should be easier for nonstate groups in the neighborhood to build a capable rebel army. The results from two complementary statistical tests on global conflict data provide strong support for such a postconflict diffusion effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article investigates two interconnected border logics—securitization and humanitarianism—as they unfold as part of soldiers’ border experiences. We wish to show the alternating implementation of these two logics and to elaborate on how are they bound together. Our ethnographic fieldwork was conducted between 2012 and 2014 along a section of the Israeli–Egyptian border, consisting of observations, as well as off-site interviews with soldiers who were stationed along this border, and analysis of media reports and court affidavits. Dedicating special attention to the interactions between soldiers and irregular migrants, we argue that the ambiguities experienced by the soldiers at the ground level result in what we call “arbitrary humanitarianism.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East India Company surveyors began gaining access to the high Himalaya in the 1810s, at a time when the mountains were taking on increasing political significance as the northern borderlands of British India. Though never as idiosyncratic as surveyors insisted, these were spaces in which instruments, fieldbook inscriptions, and bodies were all highly prone to failure. The ways surveyors managed these failures (both rhetorically and in practice) demonstrate the social performances required to establish credible knowledge in a world in which the senses were scrambled. The resulting tensions reveal an ongoing disconnect in understanding between those displaced not only from London, but also from Calcutta, something insufficiently emphasized in previous histories of colonial science. By focusing on the early nineteenth century, often overlooked in favor of the later period, this article shows the extent to which the scientific, imaginative, and political constitution of the Himalaya was haphazard and contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Problem The need to apply theory and research to practice has been expressed and argued for in the field of human resource development (HRD) and organization development for over two decades. The field of human resource development has sought to address this issue since the mid-2000s, yet not enough progress has been made. The Solution This article highlights some of the fundamental barriers that have led to low levels of scholar-practitioner collaboration. Successful models used by other professional organizations and publications to overcome the theory–practice gap will be presented. Their process of integrating traditional scholarship with practitioner applications are described, along with other recommendations for creating borderlands where both HRD scholars and practitioners work together to solve workplace and society problems. The Stakeholders There are many stakeholders who would benefit from and can actively participate in increasing collaborations between scholars and practitioners. These include traditional academic scholars, consultants, and professionals in businesses, government, schools, and health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the interaction of knowledge transfer and urbanization in the emerging cities of East and Central Europe 1880-1945. Doing so, the article is arguing that in the East European borderlands, this interaction can be understood as reception and creative development of impulses transformed by local socioeconomic and cultural factors, such as multiethnicity, multiconfessionalisation, and nationalizing processes, which are specific for these regions. Due to this, the article offers the concept of “emerging cities” on the specific model of urbanization with a focus on knowledge transfer and circulation in this historical and geographical region beyond the center–periphery scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of the special section titled From the Iron Curtain to the Schengen Area, guest edited by Wolfgang Mueller and Libora Oates-Indruchová. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of the special section titled From the Iron Curtain to the Schengen Area, guest edited by Wolfgang Mueller and Libora Oates-Indruchová.This article discusses local cultures of remembrance of Yugoslav partisans fallen during World War II in Trieste, now part of Italy, and investigates the role of memory activists in managing vernacular memory over time. The author analyses the interplay between memory and the production of space, something which has been neglected in other studies of memory formation. On the basis of local newspaper articles, archival material, and oral interviews, the essay examines the ideological imprint on the local cultural landscape, contributing to a more complex understanding of memory engagement. The focus is on grassroots initiatives rather than state-sponsored heritage projects. This article argues that memory initiatives are not solely the outcome of national narratives and top–down ideological impositions. It shows that official narratives have to negotiate with vernacular forms of memory engagement in the production of a local mnemonic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most scholarship in spatial planning presupposes an established institutional setting, where a specific legal framework is in place, one is accustomed to certain procedures and routines, and planning has a certain (national) history. In cross-border regions, however, this becomes problematic as different institutional settings clash. Combining systems and organizational theory, this article constructs a theoretical perspective on planning, explicitly conceptualizing differences, that is, boundaries, in institutional settings. This sheds new light on the prospects and realities of spatial planning across national borders. National borders double the complexity of spatial planning, and organizations working in cross-border spatial planning need to take this into account by acknowledging their own and others’ organizational boundaries as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I reflect upon my experience as an ethnographer within the informal African city, which I describe as a borderland. In the contemporary African city informality prohibits peripheral men from achieving manhood, predicated on marriage, which requires steady work. As perpetual social juniors they fantasize about an elsewhere to which an ever-porous world exposes them but which stands in stark contrast to their lived experiences. Black urbanism (Simone, 2010) situates this mediated experience of elsewhere, an imagined global conceived simultaneously as a space of creativity, possibility and disillusionment through its linkages with members of the black diaspora glorified through not productive but consumption-oriented identities. Positing that we are both borderland figures, I discuss my interactions/intersections with peripheral men in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. I consider how my identity as a woman from the African diaspora entailed a direct encounter with this elsewhere, and how this influenced their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-border cooperation to promote economic development and political integration has been among the EU's key themes since the 1990s, and contemporary policy networks are considered useful organisational solutions. Focusing on transport policies in the border regions of Basel and Luxembourg, we analyse the persistency of national preferences among policy actors, mapping their perceived 'policy spaces of action' and conceptualising these policy spaces as relational. We discuss that the networks' various actors on either side of the border appear to perceive the actual 'policy spaces' very differently. Therefore, and due to the networks' terminability, these policy spaces are highly contested and frequently negotiated between the actors. Based on a combination of in-depth interviews, sketch maps, and social network analysis, we show that large spatiocultural differences still prevail among network actors, potentially impacting on the decisions taken in cross-border policy networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural anthropologists and historians have successfully adopted a borderlands perspective to investigate interaction, power, and identity between emerging or expanding state societies. This article develops an archaeological approach to such interstitial landscapes. It conceptualizes borderlands as spaces where people engage the material world under very specific geopolitical circumstances and create very specific materialities and subjectivities in the process. Political, social, and ideological dynamics between state societies produce two kinds of cultural spaces: hybrid “third spaces” and “fractured landscapes.” Although seemingly contradictory, these often emerge side by side in the same physical space. We illustrate this process by exploring the expansion of the Catholic Church and the Swedish kingdom to the Northern Ostrobothnian coast in northern Finland during the Middle Ages (ca. 1300–1600). During this era, church buildings and cemeteries became sites where locals, ecclesial officials, and state agents negotiated their relations through complex material and spatial practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the borderlands of northeastern Cambodia, booming regional demand for luxury rosewood timber has seen the recent expansion of illegal cross-border logging in Laos. This article outlines Khmer–Lao villagers’ interactions with border authorities that enable their cross-border logging and their construction of anti-elite political narratives to critically engage with other ethnographic studies of the remote borderlands in Asia. I argue that in the quest to challenge dominant top-down assumptions of the remote borderlands as beyond state power and to highlight the unique dynamics of borderlands, ethnographic studies of these regions can focus overly on political opposition. I propose more recognition of, firstly, the desire and distrust in borderlanders’ engagements with different authorities, and secondly, the commonalities in contestation that emerge across different national spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with representations of the Northern Irish conflict by Polish migrants. It first sets the scene for the migration of Poles, discussing the issue of the sectarian divide. Subsequently, it presents a conceptual framework for understanding the construction of social representations. It then discusses migrants’ opposing tendencies to represent the ethno-religious boundaries as fixed and rigid on one hand and to represent them as fluid and shifting on the other hand. Whereas the tendency to represent the local conflict as of great consequence to migrants’ lives relates to a wider cultural knowledge, the tendency to point at ongoing social changes in Belfast is connected to a more direct exposure of Polish migrants to members of the local community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on Rogers Brubaker’s theoretical analyses of “nationness” and nationalism in post-communist Europe, this article examines the dynamics of social identity within the nationally contested setting of the Estonian–Russian borderland. Since 1991, the city of Narva (96% Russophone by population) has customarily been defined (both politically and academically) in binary national terms as a “Russian enclave” within a unitary and “nationalizing” Estonian state. An ethnographic approach to the case, however, gives a rather different perspective, pointing to hybridity rather than nationality as the defining characteristic of identity politics within the city. In what follows, we bring to bear the results of extensive fieldwork carried out in Narva during 2006–2008. We first examine how different identity categories (local, national, meso-regional, and supranational) are being officially inscribed within Narva’s sites of memory. Thereafter, we focus on how these discursive-material articulations of place are implicated within the everyday performance of identity amongst the city’s population. Using the novel methodology of photo elicitation, we examine how residents of Narva appropriate but also subvert the identity categories that elites and outsiders (including ourselves as researchers) would seek to impose on them from above. This study (we argue) is significant for its methodological novelty, as well as in terms of giving a more nuanced understanding of Narva’s situation at a time of continued ethnopolitical contestation within Estonia as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a systematic reconstruction of Georg Simmel's sociology of religion. Following the development of his sociology of religion, it successively analyses religion as a form of interaction, as a symbolic form and as a personal form. The main argument is that all of Simmel's writings are metaphysical and that religion is only one form among others that gathers the fragments of existence into a unified totality. Religiosity is the central category of Simmel's writings on religion. It 'detranscendentalizes' religion and locates its conditions of possibility within the aspirations of wholeness of the soul. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the expression of methaphor of a gap between the binaries of scholar-practitioner in human resource development that somehow requires linking. It explores the implied duality in the gap metaphor and suggests alternative to bridge the metaphor gap based on Anzaldúa's borderlands and mestiza consciousness. The author suggests that the gap metaphor provides a disservice to the HRD, which causes members of the field to analyze the binding dualities and the obstacles.

The practice of law is an occupation that has historically been dominated by white men. In recent decades, however, a small but growing number of Chicanas have entered this field. Their entry raises a number of questions regarding their occupational incorporation and mobility. This article analyzes the findings from qualitative interviews with 15 Chicana attorneys. These women identify organizational practices embedded in law firms that reinforce racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. These structural and interactional dynamics often limit opportunities for professional advancement of Chicana attorneys who "cross the border" into this white, male-dominated occupation. This research also illuminates innovative tactics employed by Chicanas to achieve their own definitions of professional "success." My analysis reveals key mechanisms in workplace structure and interaction that reinforce racially gendered "borders" created by co-workers and supervisors who "nunca toman en cuenta (never take into account)" the presence of successful Chicanas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from ethnographic research in the Research Triangle of North Carolina and Williamsburg, Virginia, the authors build on Anzaldúa's conceptualization of "borderlands" to analyze how borders of social membership are constructed and enforced in "el Nuevo South." Our gender analysis reveals that intersecting structural conditions—the labor market, the organization of public space, and the institutional organization of health care and other public services—combine with gendered processes in the home and family to regulate women's participation in community life. Enforcers of borders include institutional actors, mostly women, in social services and clinics who occupy institutional locations that enable them to define who is entitled to public goods and to categorize migrants as undeserving "others." We reveal how a particularly configured matrix of domination transcends the spheres of home, work, and community to constrain women migrants' physical and economic mobility and personal autonomy and to inhibit their participation in their societies of reception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After September 11, 2001, the U.S. and Canadian federal governments increased restrictions on materials and people crossing the border. Antiterrorism regulations have introduced costly compliance requirements, clearance delays, and unpredictable border wait times for companies conducting business across the international border. A recent study suggests that many Canadian and U.S.-based exporters intend to counteract these costs by implementing strategies including geographic supply chain reconfiguration. Strategic adjustments of this nature could have profound effects on the geography of North American supply chains, the structure and volume of bilateral trade, and the management of just-in-time delivery systems. This project follows up on the previous study via personal interviews with 35 businesses that had indicated an interest in geographic strategies. Preliminary findings suggest that firms are quickly adjusting to new security requirements and are improving communication channels throughout their cross-border supply chains to stay abreast of new developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to show, through a detailed ethnographic case, how social space can be viewed as consisting of superimposed layers. Building on theoretical frameworks of Lefebvre and Foucault in terms of their approaches to space, power, and visibility, the article looks at the Kelabit people, a small, indigenous group whose homelands lie in the interior highlands of Borneo along an international frontier. Examining various facets of the Kelabit social life, and focusing on different forms of social optics that can be identified in Kelabit social spaces, the article shows how concerns about visibility, surveillance, privacy, and control are intimately linked in this community, both with regard to life in the rural borderlands--where transnational movement and migrants pose new dilemmas in terms of community belonging--and in terms of the relationships within and between rural and urban Kelabit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is the largest antipoverty fiscal policy program for working families administered by the Internal Revenue Service (EITCs totaled $42 billion in 2003). For the 2004 tax season, U.S.-Mexico border county EITC refunds reached $1.9 billion while total tax refund amounts for low-income borderlands families topped $2.6 billion. Questionnaires administered during the tax-filing season to working families in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California border counties collected more than forty-five hundred surveys that canvassed respondents on a variety of financial behaviors and tax refund expenditures. Additionally, researchers recorded data on tax filers using their tax refunds to capitalize microbusinesses and respondents’ desires to know more about operating a microbusiness. Empirical analysis employing logistic regression produces results that parallel previous findings in the literature and suggests actionable policy prescriptions that may support family and community entrepreneurial activities in the borderlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on cultural ecology that has been highly active in the environmental borderlands. The researchers mentioned about the evidence in the growing number of works clustered in the areas described. With this, the model of the environmental borderlands is essential as a means of describing and situating these clusters, both within nature and society geography and with respect to the other subfields. The extensive engagements with the other subfields such as human geography, physical geography, and other branches of science had been illustrated.

Modernity is central to the concept of archaeology. It is not only part and parcel of the modern project, but it also throws light on the constitution of modernity itself. Although archaeologists usually reveal the higher degrees of oppression and alienation brought by the modern world, they consider that modernity is, in the first place, a productive process, in that it gives rise to new things — be they good or bad. They also tend to consider it successful in an evolutionary sense: wherever it appears, modernity wins at the expense of other rationalities, social forms, material cultures and economies, imposing its reason. This is true in most cases, but it is not necessarily so. This article explores the destructive side of modernity through a case study from Ethiopia. For this purpose, I will use archaeology to engage with a landscape where modernity has brought immense devastation and has eventually failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of borders has undergone a renaissance during the past decade. This is reflected in an impressive list of conferences, workshops and scholarly publications. This renaissance has been partly due to the emergence of a counternarrative to the borderless and deterritorialized world discourse which has accompanied much of globalization theory. The study of borders has moved beyond the limited confines of the political geography discourse, crossing its own disciplinary boundaries, to include sociologists, political scientists, historians, international lawyers and scholars of international relations. But this meeting of disciplines has not yet been successful in creating a common language or glossary of terms which is relevant to all scholars of borders. Central to the contemporary study of borders are notions such as 'borders are institutions', the process of 'bordering' as a dynamic in its own right, and the border terminologies which focus on the binary distinctions between the 'us' and 'them', the 'included' and the 'excluded'. Borders should be studied not only from a top-down perspective, but also from the bottom up, with a focus on the individual border narratives and experiences, reflecting the ways in which borders impact upon the daily life practices of people living in and around the borderland and transboundary transition zones. In positing an agenda for the next generation of border-related research, borders should be seen for their potential to constitute bridges and points of contact, as much as they have traditionally constituted barriers to movement and communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article details the manner in which the German state and the European Union (EU) have affected incentives at,{he state and local levels in their attempts to encourage transnational civil society in both Frankfurt­Oder and Slubice. While elites on both sides of the Oder have initiated some civil society organization, incentives stemming from the German state and the EU have served as the more important influence on the density and configuration of associations in these two cities. In this article, the author argues that despite deleterious legacies stemming from the Leninist period, the availability of material resources coupled with the commitment of local elites accounts for the existence of the tenuous yet influential civil society sphere examined in the case study. This article further contends that EU efforts throughout the 1990s to foster the structures of civil society have met with successes that will prove consequential to the long-run institutionalization of EU reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]