Dr Jussi P. Laine is a Professor of multidisciplinary border studies at the Karelian Institute of the University of Eastern Finland, holding the title of Docent of Human Geography at the University of Oulu, Finland. He is the President-Elect of the Western Social Science Association and currently serves on the Steering Committee of the International Geographical Union’s Commission on Political Geography. From 2013 to 2021 he led the Association for Borderlands Studies, the leading international scholarly association dedicated exclusively to the systematic interchange of ideas and information relating to international border areas. By background Dr Laine is a human geographer, yet in his approach to borders he combines influences from international relations and geopolitics, political sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology. Within border studies he seeks to explore the multiscalar production of borders and bring a critical perspective to bear on the relationship between state, territory, citizenship, and identity construction. Most recently, Dr Laine has published works on border mobility, migration, the ethics of borders and ontological (in)security.
