Borderland community and the transformative resilience of covidfencing

The article studies the relationship between borders and community resilience during the time of COVID-19 pandemic and the specific crisis condition termed ‘covidfencing’. While there is common agreement that communities and their resilience are of the uttermost importance for crisis adaptation and recovery, there is less consensus about the definition of community. The spatial and discursive framing of community and community resilience are especially interesting and complex questions when it comes to researching borderlands. The article contributes to border studies and geographical and social scientific resilience research by introducing a framework for studying borderlands community resilience in terms of community as a practice, politics and a sense of belonging. The empirical focus of the article is on the ‘covidfencing’ of the Swedish-Finnish border and on investigating how sudden, continuously changing border restrictions highlighted and altered borderlands as communities, and in what ways these communities were vulnerable and resilient regarding the crisis. Taking borderlands as an analytical lens for studying community resilience directs attention to the significance of contextual political rationales and complex state-periphery and cross-border relations in resilience processes. The communities’ ways of coping with and transforming through a crisis are relational processes in which multiscalar spatial relations, dynamics of collaboration, and conflicts of interest are continuously manifested. The borderlands community resilience approach shows the potential of transformative resilience for understanding the resilience processes of borderlands specifically and contributes to researching community resilience in transnational and multicultural settings more widely.