Mnemonic bordering: ‘Eastness’ and the politics of refugee recognition in Estonia

This article examines how Estonia’s asylum regime reveals the entanglement of migration governance, historical memory, and global hierarchies of belonging. It introduces the concept of mnemonic bordering – the use of official historical narratives as a technology of migration governance – to show how claims to asylum are filtered through national stories of suffering and redemption. In Estonia, this logic is mediated by Eastness, a shifting marker of civilisational proximity that shapes who can be recognised as part of ‘the West’. Asylum-seekers from countries associated with communism or authoritarianism are often met with suspicion, their struggles recast as signs of an ‘Eastern’ mentality rather than shared political conviction. In contrast, the conditional welcome extended to Ukrainian refugees following Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion exposes the volatility of these classifications, as geopolitical crises reorder hierarchies of migrant belonging overnight. By reexamining the Global North-South binary, the article shows how competing regional imaginaries like ‘Eastness’ operate as symbolic geographies through which states narrate modernity and negotiate whose histories may belong to Europe's future.