Between Security and Mobility: Negotiating a Hardening Border Regime in the Russian-Estonian Borderland

Abstract

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...

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