How do we account for the reinforcement of identity particularisms despite transnational integration? This paper addresses the question by comparing two ethnolinguistic groups, Silesians and Kashubs in Poland. It is argued that in order to obtain state protection and tools to develop and survive, ethnic entrepreneurs adjust to institutions and discourses. Census politics, state laws' elaboration, transnational institutions represent openings to which groups adjust by reframing identity claims. In doing so, they re‐imagine and reinforce their communities. Following Rogers Brubaker, group‐making is presented as an eventful process where ethnic elites invest identity categories with groupness by taking advantage of opportunity windows at hand. Further, tracing changing political opportunities, strategic adjustments and groups' boomerang effect bid, the paper embeds identity groups within the social movement literature.

To legitimize separation from Moldova, Transnistrian elites have been constructing a civic Transnistrian nation, subsuming local ethnic Russian, Ukrainian, and Moldovan identities. This article first identifies changes to the Transnistrian nation-building strategy: from an emphasis on Moldovan nationhood in the early 1990s to oppose “Romanianization” in Chisinau, to Transnistrian nationhood mainly after Moldovanism was adopted in Chisinau in 2001. It then shows how this multiethnic nation is being constructed, with a particular emphasis on the place of Transnistrian Moldovans. While the Moldovan identity category is being institutionalized as a part of the Transnistrian civic nation, its ecological niches are being emptied of Romanian/Bessarabian attributes and invested with Russianness. As a result, “Moldovan” now seems an empty identity category in Transnistria.

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Borders have recently attracted a lot of academic scrutiny. Two very distinct types of literature have attempted to capture the current evolution of borders. The first one, leaning more toward the field of security studies, puts the emphasis on the rampant securitization, the coercive dimension of borders, and their divisive consequences. The second, looks at the rich environment surrounding borders, where boundaries are seen as the meeting point of a variety of cultures and communities. Those social spaces, known as borderlands, are the cradle of hybrid identities and transnational networks that contest the State's claim to ultimate sovereignty over its territory. Against this backdrop, the ambition of this special issue lies in its aim to fill theoretically and empirically this gap by looking at securitized borderlands. This introductory article delineates the contours of and puts together the main findings of both security studies on borders and borderlands studies. It announces the objectives of the subsequent articles, which together look into the interaction between the securitized borders and the social spaces they both obstruct and dynamize. In spite of and within this peculiarly adverse environment of "securitized borderlands," cross border societies remain in existence, resist, comply, and adjust. Paradoxical border(land)sBorders encircle the territory on which a State claims sovereignty and demarcate its spatial boundaries. They materialize the far edges of the State's monopoly on the legitimate use of force. They are thus limits that need to be defended and simultaneously contact points between states and their respective citizens.On the one hand, borders are the outer limits to the spatial scope of State's power and, as such, strategic lines that need to be defended against unwanted intrusions. From a historical perspective, States formation resulted from the successful waging of wars. It meant that new territories were integrated and powers centralized (Tilly 1992). Therefore, borders created States as much as States created borders (Anderson 1996). On that basis, the management of borders-and their much-discussed degree of permeability-

The 1992–1993 civil wars in Moldova and in Georgia ended with a de facto separation of Transnistria and Abkhazia, respectively. These de facto states are both inhabited by the kin to the ‘enemy’ across the administrative border: Moldovans and Georgians/Mingrelians. How do the de facto authorities foster a collective identity in support of their claim for legitimacy and statehood? Engaging with Wimmer's taxonomy of boundary‐making, this article argues that nation‐building involves not only expansion but also, simultaneously, contraction. Transnistria constructs a higher‐level identity category and co‐opts and contracts the Moldovan category, separating it into ‘our’ and Bessarabian Moldovans in order to incorporate the former into the Transnistrian people. In Abkhazia, the nation‐building project establishes the Abkhazs as the titular nation allowing, however, for the construction of an Abkhazian people that would include minorities, with Gal/i Georgians said to be Mingrelians, distinct from Georgians. These cases show that elites combine different ethnic boundary‐making strategies in order to implement their favoured identity project and to legitimize the claimed statehood.