The Russian-Estonian border has undergone radical changes in the past two decades -from an integrated borderland between two Soviet republics to a border between nation-states and the new EU external border. Until the present day it is a discursive battlefield that reflects the difficult relations between Russia and Estonia after the restoration of Estonia's independence. While much research has concentrated on antagonistic projects of identity politics and state-building from a from a top-down perspective, this paper asks how people living in the borderland make sense of the place they live in and negotiate shifts in the symbolic landscapes. Based on life-story narratives of Russian-speakers, it analyzes different ways of narrating and framing place and argues for a consideration of the plurality and ambivalences of place-making projects on the ground.Furthermore, it argues for a more balanced account of continuity and discontinuity in memory narratives by taking into account how the socialist past continues to be meaningful in the present. As the interviews show, memories of the socialist past are used for constructing belonging in the present both by countering and by reproducing national narratives of boundedness.

Research on spatial polarisation in Central and Eastern Europe has tended to focus on macro-economic processes that create certain places and people as peripheral and has highlighted the socioeconomic impact of peripheralisation, while paying only limited attention to local experiences and responses.Drawing on a multiscalar conception of peripheralisation processes, the article examines the making of socio-spatial inequalities from the perspective of the periphery and foregrounds the narrative practices through which actors negotiate peripheralisation processes focusing on the case of Narva, a former industrial city in Estonia's Northeastern region. In the face of negative structural dynamics actors rework their peripheral status by articulating a positive sense of belonging, claiming recognition based on their work and trying to exert control over their futures. The paper particularly highlights generational differences within these narrative responses to spatial inequalities. While older workingclass populations' narratives are shaped by collective and place-based resilience, the post-socialist generation employs more individualised strategies in the face of peripheralisation and exercises agency by detaching themselves from place. Analysing these responses, the article draws attention to constrained agency as well as cultural differentiation within peripheral communities.

Since the end of the Cold War order post-Soviet borders have been characterised by geopolitical tensions and divergent imaginations of desirable political and spatial orders. Drawing upon ethnographic research in two border towns at the Russian-Estonian border, the article makes a case for a grounded examination of these border dynamics that takes into account how borders as sites of 'mobility and enclosure' are negotiated in everyday life and shaped by the differentiated incorporations of statecraft into people's lives. Depending on their historical memories, people interpret the border either as a barrier to previously free movement or as a security device and engage in correspondingly different relations to the state -privileging local concerns for mobility or adopting the state's concerns over security and sovereignty. Analysing these border negotiations and the relations between citizens and the state, articulated in people's expectations and claims, can provide us with a better understanding of how people participate in the making of borders and contribute to the stability and malleability of political orders.Keywords: border; mobility; security; Russia; Estonia IntroductionThe towns of Narva and Ivangorod lie opposite each other on the Narova River, which marks the border between Estonia and Russia and the external border of the European Union. Despite being often defined as belonging to two opposing civilizational projects -the West and the East, Europe and Russia -symbolised by the architecture of their historic fortresses, throughout most of their history these two towns have been intimately connected. During the Soviet past, when the area was a major industrial 2 centre at the Soviet Union's western fringe, Narva and Ivangorod formed an integrated social and economic space: friendships and kin ties stretched from one town to the other; people went across the bridge to work in one of the large factories on the other side; they engaged in shared leisure activities like singing in a choir, sports activities and going to the cinema and buried their loved ones on a common cemetery. When Estonia declared its independence in 1991 and successively installed border guards and material fortifications along the border, the dense social and economic networks between the towns became more difficult to sustain, and the once integrated borderland turned into a site of divisions and nationalisation. 'Nas razrezali po-zhivomu', a Russian phrase meaning 'we were forced to break off our relations', or literally 'we were cut up alive' was used repeatedly by my informants to characterise the division of Narva and Ivangorod when I conducted fieldwork on both sides of the border between August 2011 and February 2012. In the eyes of many borderlanders, most of them Russianspeakers who had moved to the borderland during the Soviet past the border had cut through their lives; it was experienced as a forced and violent intrusion of the state into their everyday spaces. Even 20 years after the instalment of the first border guar...

This article is part of the special section titled Recursive Easts, Shifting Peripheries, guest edited by Pamela Ballinger. The break-up of the Cold War order, the eastwards expansion of the European Union into former socialist countries and the more recent economic and humanitarian crises have led to the emergence of new symbolic borders and the reconfiguration of spatial hierarchies within Europe. The article shows how metageographical categories of “Europe,” “East,” and “West” and underlying classificatory logics are not only circulated in geopolitical discourses but can be appropriated by ordinary citizens in their everyday life. Using the Russian–Estonian border as a case study, the article examines the recursive negotiations of Europe’s East–West border by people living in the borderland as a response to the geopolitical changes. It highlights three border narratives: the narrative of becoming peripheral/Eastern, the narrative of becoming European, and a narrative contesting the East–West hierarchy by associating the East and one’s own identity with positive things. On both sides of the border, the status as a new periphery does not create unity across the border but rather results in multiple and competing border narratives, in which “Europe” functions as an unstable referent in relation to which one’s position is marked out. This “nested peripheralisation” at Europe’s new margins reflects power relations and uneven local experiences of transformation.

The field of border studies has traditionally paid little attention to questions of temporality, leading to criticisms over its presentism and lack of historical reflexivity. A number of recent publications have brought temporal questions more centrally into border research, examining the changing and historically contingent nature of borders. This article intervenes in this body of scholarship, using memory as a means of studying the past and present of borders. Bringing border studies scholarship into a more systematic conversation with memory studies, the article shows how memories of the past play an important part in the symbolic construction of borders, and that processes of remembering are central to how citizens produce borders in everyday life. The focus on memory and everyday borderwork allows to go beyond linear and uniform conceptions of time that have shaped the writing on border temporality. It draws attention to how time is ordered and interpreted in non-linear and multiple ways and how these temporal orderings confirm, extend or question the meanings of borders. The usefulness of studying memory in everyday borderwork is exemplified through an analysis of memory narratives in the Russian-Estonian borderland, based on extensive fieldwork and the analysis of 58 narrative life-story interviews.