Exploring Border Studies: From Eurasia to the World

Border Studies was fashioned after the end of the Cold War, and is now struggling with new challenges – most obviously those provoked by the Russian War in Ukraine from 2022. Though Covid 19 did serious damage to borderlands, resulting in their fortification and segregation from other spaces, their more fluid characteristics appeared to the returning as epidemiological concerns dissipated. However, Russia’s War has destroyed the international order that Russia (or at least the Soviet Union) established and guaranteed in the world. Many borderlands vis-à-vis Russia, particularly those of Europe, have returned to the confrontational dead-ends they represented before 1991. Is the border studies “renaissance” also close to its end? This paper is a personal account of the author’s own journey to discover border studies; from Euro-Asian spaces to North American ones. It reflects the author’s efforts to conduct borderwork initially at the edges of China, Russia, Japan and the Koreas, engage with maritime border issues, and offer some theoretical clues for how to compare different borders. The author also proposes reshaping a “Border Studies 2.0” that centers on the resilience of border peoples against the war and terror, and asserts the necessity for everyday contacts and cooperation with neighbors on the other side of contested borders.