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January 2008 - present
Publications
Publications (96)
Place is of central significance to urban planning processes that specifically target community involvement and co-ownership of development decisions. Consequently, the intriguing but often daunting task of understanding how a sense of place emerges, develops, and evolves has been a subject of interdisciplinary study that links the social sciences,...
Understood in some conceptual analysis as a pillar of territorial cohesion and due to its critical role in promoting territorial integration, territorial cooperation is often presented as one of the major positive achievements of European Union (EU) Cohesion Policy. In this context, this article proposes a conceptual framework to assess the contrib...
VOICITYS was implemented between January 2018 and June 2019 as a pilot project supported by the Rights, Equality
and Citizenship Programme of the European Union. VOICITYS’ aims were to improve social integration through
the strengthening of social dialogue in European neighbourhoods characterized by ethnic and cultural diversity,
through improvi...
The chapterCross-territorial Governancediscusses the governanceTerritorial Cohesion aspect of territorial cohesion in the EU which itself is considered as a genuine model ofMulti-level Governance multi-level governance (MLG). During the last 70 years, the EU managed to generate a new discourse on geographic space opposing the nation-state model pro...
This article introduces a Research Colloquium that investigates relationships between the production of Central European geopolitical imaginaries and processes of European integration. Specifically, we interrogate the ways in which Central European geopolitical imaginaries have involved the recasting of old and the emergence of new framings of regi...
This paper discusses ways in which Hungarian border studies have reflected processes of post-1989 transformation by moving towards a contextual perspective on diaerent border-making (bordering) processes. Traditionally, Hungarian border studies, and with them geographical conceptualizations of Hungarian state spaces, have reflected changing histori...
This paper explores how the geographical idea of the Carpathian Basin has been employed in post-1989 Hungarian conceptualizations of regional development across state borders. This involves understanding the tensions that have emerged between different and partly competing notions of the Carpathian Basin as a cooperation space that reflects “Europe...
This paper discusses the significance and potential consequences of illiberal politics for the Visegrád Group’s (Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia) role as a regional integration platform. Moreover, links between Europeanizationand V4 geopolitical identity will be explored as part of investigating discursive framings of Central Europe’s “illib...
This book critically analyses the changing EU-Russian security environment in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, with a particular focus on northern Europe where the EU and the Russian Federation share a common border.
Russian involvement in conflict situations in the EU’s immediate neighbourhood has drastically impacted the European security environ...
One of the main messages of this still new Millennium is that realist geopolitics is back with a vengeance. It is of course debatable whether “hard power” geopolitics actually ever disappeared from the scene, and its role is obviously key in any discussion about the darkening of optimistic visions of a post-Cold War order based on multilateralism a...
In their bid to combine economic growth with efficiency gains, environmental improvements, and more positive images, Polish cities have embraced Smart City (SC) strategies. Normative visions of the Smart City couple advances in ICT with the promise of more inclusive, effective and democratic local governance, but critics of SC urge caution. This st...
The power of borders emerges not only from their institutional and legal nature but also from their symbolic and identity-forming significance. This innovative Research Agenda uncovers the links between different levels of border-making processes, or bordering, from the political to the cognitive, and connects everyday processes and experiences of...
Der Beitrag gibt ausgehend von einem Interesse an Cross-Border Governance einen Überblick über Entwicklung, disziplinäre Verortung und definitorische Prämissen des Begriffs Governance hin zu einem der größten ‚Modewörter‘ der Sozialwissenschaften. Es wird der Kontext und Entstehung von Cross-Border Governance beleuchtet, das Wechselverhältnis von G...
Linking borders to cognition can widen our understandings of space-society relations. In this contribution, border-making will be related to the creation of urban place distinctions and place narratives that create a sense of specific "thereness." The focus is not on cognitive mappings of urban borders as such. Rather, border-making will be reveale...
With the publication of Henk van Houtum’s and Ton van Naerssen’s (2002) essay on Bordering, Othering and Ordering, border studies received innovative and liberating inspiration. Partly as a result of the essay contemporary border studies recognise the fluid and changing nature of borders, their increasing sophistication, and the complexity of borde...
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 b...
Border regions reflect the impacts of state borders on political spaces, economic relationships, and social life. As their constitution and function are very much context‐dependent, conceptualizations of border regions reveal a great deal of fluidity and ambiguity. Furthermore, the way in which border regions are comprehended, studied, and interpre...
As part of the wider debate interrogating ethical consequences of managing mobility through borders, questions related to everyday ontological security (such as the identity of the self) and disruptions of self-referential ways of seeing the world need to be taken seriously. Identitary bordering within the EU is not only fed by social media and pop...
This special issue of the Journal of Finnish Studies, Engaging the New Mobilities Paradigm in the Context of Finland, brings to the readers twelve fresh examples of research about migration and mobility in Finland. The volume is divided into four sections: Social and Cultural Experiences and Meanings of Mobility (Part I); Everyday Life and Lived Pl...
The main objective of the essay is to argue that a powerful revanchist and self-referential narrative of authenticity and autonomy is influencing the securitization of mobility. Cultural nationalism, coupled with elements of a new sovereigntism that reifies national interests and unilateralism, is a direct challenge to globalist assumptions that pr...
Limits and edges of human experience, power, and control have been expressed in language from the time of earliest writing, and likely before then in the spoken words of ordering and bordering space and territory among people. Our brief discussion of the language of borders is not a comprehensive examination of the topic, but an invitation to evalu...
This essay contextualises Hungarian antipolitics of Europe as an element of radical conservative nation-building and as a reflection of the strategic use of borders. Two concrete examples of border politics will be elaborated that document shifts from EU-conformity to EU-contestation and the increasing political significance of culturalist argument...
This special section of European Urban and Regional Studies maps out a move from a strictly geopolitical to more socio-political and socio-cultural interpretations of the European Union’s (EU’s) ‘Mediterranean neighbourhood’. In doing this, the authors propose a dialogic understanding of neighbourhood as a set of ideas and imaginaries that reflect...
During the Cold War years, the idea that political borders had somehow achieved a state of permanence and immutability enjoyed currency as an almost common-sense notion, despite lessons of history and long-durée processes of state formation in Europe and Eurasia. For countries on the frontline of the Cold War in Europe, especially on both sides of...
This book has sought to explore different political and social contexts as a backdrop for re-bordering processes in Europe subsequent to the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This has been done by examining conceptual change in rhetoric connected to the definition, negotiation and conflict over borders. Both continuity an...
In the aftermath of the Ukraine crises, borders within the wider post-Cold War and post-Soviet context have become a key issue for international relations and public political debate. These borders are frequently viewed in terms of military preparedness and confrontation, but behind armed territorial conflicts there has been a broader shift in the...
As part of a repertoire of the European Union’s (EU’s) geopolitical practices, the imaginary of Mediterranean Neighbourhood is a means with which to manage dissonance between the EU’s self-image as a normative power, changing political situations in the region and the Realpolitik of security. We argue that this also involved a ‘politics of in/visib...
The objective of this paper is to theorize border-making processes in urban contexts as exemplary of the ways in which borders within human societies are formed. In fact, the question as to whether socially meaningful borders are created through state-society and systemic relations or whether they ultimately emerge locally out of social relations i...
This essay focuses attention on aspects of border politics that give evidence of nation-building and national consolidation processes in Central Europe. In a normative, policy-oriented sense this is a question of borders as framing conditions for regional development. In a more critical and analytical sense this involves interrogating the actual us...
As Fassin and Windels (2016) argue, political xenophobia needs to be explained politically. At the same time, while political xenophobia is not a necessary consequence of neoliberalism, the idea of what counts as ‘political’ needs to be expanded. I suggest that one fruitful, non-reductionist strategy for understanding the consequences of identitary...
This perspective on Hungary’s post-socialist regional policy governance is informed by an approach that relates region-building and regional governance to social autopoiesis and the self-referential and self-(re)producing nature of social systems such as states. Following debates in regional studies that reflect tensions between the local constitut...
In the broadest sense, subnational cooperation across national borders involves three distinct but often interconnected levels: cooperation within local and contiguous cross-border spaces; cooperation between regions beyond local border contexts; and transnational networks that can involve cities or groups of cities. These forms of cooperation have...
The paper relates intersectionality to the construction of urban borders based on a case study of Roma neighbourhoods in Budapest. In doing this the authors focus on rationales behind appropriating and demarcating urban spaces according to political, ethno-territorial and economic agendas. We are concerned with bordering as reflected in representat...
Bordering, Political Landscapes and Social Arenas: Potentials and Challenges of Evolving Border Concepts in a post-Cold War World (EUBORDERSCAPES), financed though the EU's 7 th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, was a four-year research project that tracked and interpreted conceptual change in the study of borders. As...
How can EU actorness be conceptualized within the context of Neighborhood? The central purpose of this essay is to contribute a “bottom-up” and more contextually sensitive perspective to the critical assessment of European Union actorness and, in this way, also contribute to a more inclusive understanding of Neighborhood as a regional cooperation p...
The chapter presents the state of the art of debates on theoretical and practical issues concerning border politics and cross-border cooperation in Europe, that are relevant to the interaction between the EU border regions and their immediate neighbours. The chapter focuses on the concept of ‘bordering’ as a theoretical and empirical approach to un...
EUBORDERREGIONS is a four-year project that has explored relationships between borders, cooperation and development at the European Union’s external boundaries. Regions on both sides of the EU’s new external borders are generally far from large economic centres and lack many of the employment opportunities available elsewhere. A major reason for th...
Using the borderscapes concept, this book offers an approach to border studies that expresses the multilevel complexity of borders, from the geopolitical to social practice and cultural production at and across the border. Accordingly, it encourages a productive understanding of the processual, de-territorialized and dispersed nature of borders and...
Recognising the close interrelationships between social change and paradigm shifts, this book contributes to an interpretation of conceptual change in the study of borders. In so doing, the book responds to the challenge for generating different ways of conceptualising borders, thereby offering a chance to cope with the ‘real danger of a growing di...
Tensions between securitisation and cross-border interaction have been a major focus of European border studies - particularly as a result of human suffering and deaths of immigrants "sans papiers" attempting to enter the EU from the South and East. Perceptions of a Fortress Europe and a unilateral imposition of border security regimes in many ways...
The paper is based on first results of the EUBORDERSCAPES project supported by the 7th European Framework Programme and revisits a number of major themes and concepts that have been important for the development of border studies in recent years. It also investigates emerging research perspectives that appear to be important drivers of conceptual c...
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were high hopes of Russia's "modernisation" and rapid political and economic integration with the EU. But now, given its own policies of national development, Russia appears to have 'limits to integration'. Today, much European political discourse again evokes East/West civilisational divides and antago...
This paper will present evidence of regionalization processes taking shape in “Finnish–Russian” Karelia based on the construction of “familiarity”. This region-building strategy harks back to the well-known Euroregion model developed within the context of European integration. However, if Euroregions can be seen as largely public sector projects of...
This introductory article to the present collection outlines a comparative research perspective that focuses on processes of post‐socialist urban transformation and strategies of urban regeneration in different cities of Central Eastern Europe. In particular, urban regeneration will be discussed within the context of post‐socialist urban governance...
Based on a case study of Budapest, the authors discuss how regeneration strategies are being negotiated within post-socialist transformation contexts. Post-socialist transformation is in many ways a pronounced case of globalization and accommodation to market-driven logics of urban development. The example of regeneration strategies in Budapest hig...
This paper presents results from research projects that have investigated networks of civil society organizations (CSOs) between EU member states and neighbouring countries. The focus here is on Finnish-Russian civil society co-operation in the areas of social welfare provision as well as regional and economic development. One major objective in th...
Civil society observations of the EU's geopolitical impacts on its immediate neighbourhood provide a nuanced ‘ground-up’ perspective that eschews historically deterministic interpretations of the EU's role in the world. While this article is limited to Eastern Europe, it nevertheless highlights some of the challenges facing the EU's visions of ‘Nei...
Organizations of the ’social economy’, such as cooperative style enterprises, mutual help societies and voluntary associations,
have long played an important role in national and regional development in Western countries Since the dramatic political
changes of 1989, their importance in Central and Eastern Europe has also steadily increased. As Char...
This collaborative study pursues a dual objective. On the one hand, it focuses on the actual and potential roles of civil society in developing new forms of political, economic and socio‐cultural cooperation within the emerging ‘European Neighbourhood’. On the other hand, through this investigation of civil society networks it contributes to the ‘E...
The European Union is presently constructing a new model of regional coopera-tion that includes not only economic objectives but also social, cultural and environmental agendas. One of the main challenges this project faces is the development of closer ties to neighbouring states without offering outright membership to the EU. As a result, however,...
Mit diesem Beitrag will der Autor die Regenerierungsstrategie der Stadt Frankfurt (Oder) als ein Prozess der Multi-Ebenen-Steuerung (oder „Multilevel Governance“ [MLG]) analysieren (vgl. den Beitrag von Kilper in diesem Band). Eine wichtige Herausforderung besteht darin, Governance auf der lokalen Ebene als kontextabhängigen Prozess zu verstehen, w...
'New' regionalism privileges social communication over political 'coercion' as a means to motivate intermunicipal, interagency and multiactor co-operation in metropolitan regions. Critics claim, however, that the NR is little more than urban crisis management within increasingly unstable post-Fordist and neo-liberal environments. This analysis of e...
In response to enlargement, the EU's `Wider Europe' initiative and emerging European Neighbourhood Policy envisage `positive interdependence' with neighbouring countries of the `East' and `South'. `Partnerships' are seen as an alternative to direct EU membership and thus as a sustainable incentive for regional cooperation. In order to be effective,...
This article deals with attempts to create a transnational political community in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) in order to deal with a variety of economic, environmental, security and social issues. Characterized by considerable institutional heterogeneity, regionalist initiatives in the BSR could presage the emergence of new 'networked' governance...
The European Union is an example of regionalisation characterised not only by economic integration, but also by a 'spatial politics' aimed at instilling a sense of European identity and citizenship. Spatial politics are discussed here in terms of governance, regional policies and the production of geographical knowledge that reinforce the notion of...
This paper situates an emerging Baltic Sea regionalism within the larger geopolitical context of European integration and enlargement and focuses on the role of spatial planning and regional development policies. Increasingly, symbolic geographies and visionary planning concepts are being employed to support a notion of Baltic regional community wh...
This chapter touches upon the phenomenon of transboundary regionalism as a new form of political regulation and as a subject of increasing research relevance. Transboundary regionalism can be defined as a spatially integrated form of political co-operation and problem-solving that transcends the limits of nationally based administrative practice an...
Subnational paradiplomacy, in the words of Panayotis Soldatos (1993: 48), ‘refers to direct international activity by subnational actors (federated units, regions, urban communities; cities) supporting, complementing, correcting, duplicating, or challenging the nation-state’s diplomacy’. At the same time it is an attempt to rationalize the policy-m...
Germany has played a central role in elevating transboundary cooperation to the relatively high political status it now enjoys within the European Union (EU) for geopolitical, economic, and historical reasons. In promoting transboundary cooperation, Germany has pursued an agenda of institutionalization based on the vertical and horizontal integrati...
This paper discusses cross-border regionalism within the supranational contexts of the European Union and the developing North American Free Trade Area. Focusing on planning and regional development issues, cross-border regionalism as a new form of governance is investigated, based on a comparison of supranational integration logics, co-operation f...
Research summarized here indicates that, despite a certain degree of success, particularly in the area of environmental protection, German - Polish transboundary planning cooperation is being hampered by considerable lags between political agenda-setting, European Union structural programming, and postsocialist institutional transformation. Further...
The German‐Polish border region, located along the European Union's eastern boundary, is characterized by sharp disparities in living standards and development. It also is a zone of contact between two very different political traditions and cultures that often have confronted each other in conflict. Since 1990, cooperation attempts on the German‐P...
Transborder cooperation in Western Europe has made considerable progress. Primarily because of the activities of local groups, such as the Regio Basiliensis, and the support of international organizations, such as the Council of Europe, the Upper Rhine Valley and other European border regions have succeeded in voicing their interests in a fairly co...
Transborder cooperation in Western Europe has made considerable progress. Primarily because of the activities of local groups, such as the Regio Basiliensis, and the support of international organizations, such as the Council of Europe, the Upper Rhine Valley and other European border regions have succeeded in voicing their interests in a fairly co...
