The Eur-Asian Border Lab, now based at Tallinn University, aims to bring together a community of scholars studying borders and bordering who are interested in trans-regional research synergies and intellectual conversations. We continue testing theoretical ideas on borders and bordering in diverse empirical settings and learning from insights from across regions and disciplines.
We understand bordering as an increasingly complicated and nuanced conceptual process at the core of many critical developments and practices worldwide. We believe that the lens of bordering helps to unpack topics as diverse as territorial aggression, responses to pandemics and changing climate patterns, issues around mobilities and migration, efforts by states, communities, corporations or individuals to regulate and order space, politics, identities in diverse and complex ways. We see borders as increasingly imagined, constructed, perceived and navigated in new spaces, both virtual or literal, in the wake of more sophisticated and transformative technologies. We believe that the volumetric turn in border studies has greatly expanded the spatial imagination of borders, owing to human activity and control extending to new heights, depths, and virtual domains, made possible by technological advancement and diversification.
We also seek to learn more about what borders and bordering constitute for practitioners and policy-makers through facilitating mutual conversations and co-learning formats.
We believe that Estonia is a living lab for studying borders. Why?
- Located at the margins of past empires and having survived multiple occupations, Estonia in 1991 switched from being violently enclosed by the historic Iron Curtain to becoming the contemporary frontline of the EU, NATO, and Schengen.
- Shaped by its historical legacies, Estonia’s continuing complex forms of territorial and societal bordering help to illuminate the entanglement of geopolitics, identities, state practices, policy and geopolitical blind spots, and the underlying tensions more widely.
- Renowned for pioneering e-state initiatives—such as e-residency and the world’s first data embassy—Estonia opens up discussions about forms of bordering yet to emerge.
- Continuously tested in its efforts to safeguard its sovereignty at voluminous border spaces—from undersea cables to airspace violations and GPS jamming in cyber space—Estonia provides rich empirical material and insights for conceptualizations of emerging bordering themes.