Suchergebnisse

The past decade has witnessed a shift from "open borders" policies and cross-border cooperation towards heightened border securitization and the building of border walls. In the EU context, since the migration influx of 2015–2016, many Member States have retained the re-instituted Schengen border controls intended to be temporary. Such heightened border securitization has produced high levels of anxiety among various populations and increased societal polarization. This paper focuses on the processes underpinning asylum seeker reception at the re-bordered Finnish-Swedish border and in the Finnish border town of Tornio. The asylum process is studied from the perspective of local authorities and NGO actors active in the everyday reception, care and control practices in the border securitization environment enacted in Tornio in 2015. The analysis highlights how the 'success' of everyday reception work at the Tornio border crossing was bound to the historical openness of the border and pre-existing relations of trust and cooperation between different actors at various scales. The paper thus provides a new understanding of the significance of borders and border crossings from the perspective of resilience and highlights some of the paradoxes of border securitization. It notes that although border closures are commonly envisioned as a direct response to forced migration, the everyday practices and capacities of the asylum reception at the Finnish-Swedish border are themselves highly dependent on pre-existing border crossings and cross-border cooperation.

"This book offers new insights into the current, highly complex border transitions taking place at the EU internal and external border areas, as well as globally. It focuses on new frontiers and intersections between borders, borderlands and resilience, developing new understandings of resilience through the prism of borders. The book provides new perspectives into how different groups of people and communities experience, adapt and resist the transitions and uncertainties of border closures and securitization in their everyday and professional lives. The book also provides new methodological guidelines for the study of borders and multi-sited bordering and resilience processes. The book bridges border studies and social scientific resilience research in new and innovative. It will be of interest to students and scholars in geography, political studies, international relations, security studies and Anthropology"--

Este artículo analiza el potencial del concepto de resiliencia para la investigación desde la geopolítica crítica en el contexto de la frontera interna entre Finlandia y Suecia en la Unión Europea. El examen se centra en la geopolítica cotidiana de la resiliencia, manifestada en la política de adaptación/no adaptación a los requisitos estatales, y en dos de los principales eventos fronterizos que han tenido un impacto considerable en las instituciones fronterizas y en la vida de las personas en la frontera: primero, la intervención de la frontera estatal durante el "largo verano de la migración" europeo de 2015 y, en segundo lugar, la pandemia de Covid-19 a la que Finlandia respondió con una regulación estricta, mientras que Suecia continuó con una política de fronteras abiertas. El material del estudio se recopiló a través de la realización de trabajo de campo y entrevistas en la zona fronteriza entre Finlandia y Suecia, y de los medios de comunicación finlandeses y suecos. Ambos casos brindan un ejemplo de una rápida intervención fronteriza y de securitización.

This article scrutinizes the potential of the resilience concept for critical geopolitical research in the EU-internal Finnish-Swedish border context. The examination focuses on the everyday geopolitics of resilience – manifested in the politics of adaptation/non-adaptation towards state based requirements – and the two major border events that have had a considerable impact on the border institution and the lives of borderland people: first, the state border intervention during the 2015 European "long summer of migration" and second, the Covid-19 pandemic that Finland responded with strict regulation whereas Sweden continued an open border policy. The material of the study was collected by conducting fieldwork and interviews in the Finnish-Swedish border area and from the Finnish and Swedish media. Both cases provide an example of a rapid border intervention and securitization. ; Este artículo analiza el potencial del concepto de resiliencia para la investigación desde la geopolítica crítica en el contexto de la frontera interna entre Finlandia y Suecia en la Unión Europea. El examen se centra en la geopolítica cotidiana de la resiliencia, manifestada en la política de adaptación/no adaptación a los requisitos estatales, y en dos de los principales eventos fronterizos que han tenido un impacto considerable en las instituciones fronterizas y en la vida de las personas en la frontera: primero, la intervención de la frontera estatal durante el "largo verano de la migración" europeo de 2015 y, en segundo lugar, la pandemia de Covid-19 a la que Finlandia respondió con una regulación estricta, mientras que Suecia continuó con una política de fronteras abiertas. El material del estudio se recopiló a través de la realización de trabajo de campo y entrevistas en la zona fronteriza entre Finlandia y Suecia, y de los medios de comunicación finlandeses y suecos. Ambos casos brindan un ejemplo de una rápida intervención fronteriza y de securitización.

The paper studies the changing spatial rationalizations of Finnish education policy with a particular focus on upper secondary education, which has gone through significant reforms in recent decades. The fostering of social and spatial equality has long represented the cornerstone of Finland's Nordic welfare state education system. The establishment of a widespread network of educational institutions also formed an important means of building social and territorial cohesion in the country. Since the late 1980s, Finnish education policies have turned towards neoliberal ideals, underlining economic rationalizations, individualization and flexibility. Also, education policy has come to play an increasingly important role in the constitution of the knowledge-based economy and embedded spatial restructuring. The paper scrutinizes recent state upper secondary education reforms from the perspective of spatial justice and its scalar dimensions, underlining the consequential juncture of choosing between upper secondary education paths. It is shown how the rationalization of Finnish education policy differentiates places, favouring urban over rural, and produces particular citizen-subjects: while general upper secondary education forms a site for producing skilled and globally minded citizens, vocational education prioritizes the availability of regional workforce and the prevention of youth marginalization. Rather than providing equal opportunities, it is argued that the dual-path Finnish education policy reinforces spatial differentiation and the differential inclusion of citizen-subjects in the knowledge-based economy.

This article explores how the multiplication of labour migration categories relies upon strategic territorialisations of borders to differentiate between workers' nationalities, worksites, and skills in Finland. We argue that for certain categories of workers, migration policies encourage workers to become mobile in ways that make them more precarious. We analyse worksites that show the different ways that labour is made mobile: the internationalization of higher education; Finnair's labour outsourcing and offshoring practices; and the recruitment of forest berry-pickers from Thailand. We first trace contentious migration politics in Finland, revealing conflicts over labour protections, universal labour rights, the state's obligations to create employment, economic competitiveness, national identity, and the precarisation of work. We show how practices of legal, procedural, and spatial differentiation particularise the conditions of work and argue that, even for skilled workers, the strategic territorialisation of borders works to differentiate between workers and work sites. This differentiation works to make labour mobile in multiple ways and, due to the selective territorialisation of labour protections, the political geographies of migration in Finland tend towards the precarisation of labour for skilled and unskilled workers alike.