Eur-Asian Border Lab

Download the paper here 👇
🔗 borderlab.eu/policy-paper...

#EurAsianBorderLab #BorderStudies #MigrationPolicy #EULaw #Asylum

Drawing on insights from border studies, our latest policy paper tries to interpret the new Pact, revealing how it codifies practices first introduced during crisis moments – rapid screening, containment zones, and probabilistic filtering – into the permanent architecture of EU border governance.

The EU’s New Pact📘 on Migration and Asylum will come into force in June 2026. It’s the most ambitious overhaul of Europe’s migration system in a decade. However, behind the Pact’s language of “efficiency” and “solidarity” lies a major shift in how borders, crises, and people are governed.

On Oct 26, Europe turns clocks back an hour. Seems routine, but it's sovereignty in action - states coordinating when you wake up, go to work, when shops open. This is a form of temporal border that's so invisible but shapes daily life across territories.⏰
#EurAsianBorderLab #BorderStudies

Our field trip to the Saatse Boot - a bizarre Russian corridor through Estonia - became the story itself. Hours after crossing, authorities shut it down due to military concerns. Monique Taylor examines what happened in @lowyinstitute.bsky.social's the interpreter👇
borderlab.eu/news/saatse-...

When the river moves, someone has to decide if the border moves with it or stays put. There’s nothing automatic about any of it.

What other “natural” boundaries have we convinced ourselves are inevitable?🤔

📸Pillandia
#EurAsianBorderLab #BorderStudies #NaturalBorders #Rivers #Geopolitics

What’s really happening when we call a border “natural” is that we’re hiding a political choice behind geography. It makes a human decision look like geographic inevitability. But someone still chose which river, and someone decided whether the line runs down the middle or along one bank.

When China and Russia nearly went to war over a river island in 1969, it was partly because the Ussuri kept moving the border between them. They finally settled it in 2004 by agreeing to divide the island, but the river🌊 hasn’t stopped shifting.

In 1864, a flood cut off a chunk of Mexico and attached it to Texas. For over a century, the two countries argued over whether El Chamizal belonged to Mexico (because that’s where it started) or the US (because that’s where the river now ran).

Rivers🚣 seem like the obvious choice for borders. They’re visible, they’re definitive, and they move slowly (or so we assume). For centuries, diplomats loved them precisely because they appeared to be nature’s own boundary markers, requiring no human intervention.

But rivers don’t read treaties!

Jussi P. Laine has published a new chapter in the Routledge Handbook of European Borderlands, edited by James W. Scott and Thomas M. Wilson.

🔗 borderlab.eu/research-new... (open access)

#EurAsianBorderLab

Replacing passport stamps with digital records, the system will collect biometric and personal data, marking a major step toward the full digitisation of Europe’s external borders.

🔗https://borderlab.eu/estonia-news/estonia-and-eu-to-introduce-new-digital-entry-exit-system-ees-from-october-12/

From October 12, a new EU-wide Entry/Exit System (EES) will be introduced across European countries, including Estonia, to register third-country nationals entering and leaving the Schengen area.

Bordering in silence: A volumetric archive of identity - Eur-Asian BorderLab This work by Mia Tran is the second runner-up essay of the Eur-Asian Border Lab’s […]

🔗Read the full essay: borderlab.eu/blog/borderi...

#EurAsianBorderLab #BorderStudies #VolumetricBorders #Identity

The review team noted this essay was so deeply personal that conventional theoretical frameworks would have destroyed what it accomplishes. Identity here is volumetric, layered, and beautifully contradictory, expanding across generations and geographies in ways that refuse simple categorisation.

This moment sits at the heart of Mia’s essay, now published as our second runner-up from the volumetric borders contest. The essay moves between her father’s 1979 refugee journey🌊 and her mother’s 2005 gender-expectation rebellion. Mia herself is in between...

When Mia Tran pinned a single letter to her mother on a gallery wall in Saigon, she didn’t expect what happened next. Thousands of strangers covered that wall with Post-it notes - secrets, longings, grief they’d never spoken aloud. An art exhibition became a space where people could finally be seen.

Bodies, bytes, and borders: Unpacking the volumetric barriers of global healthcare access - Eur-Asian BorderLab This work by Gwen Petrina Latenri Tappu is the first runner-up essay of the Eur-Asian […]

Check out the essay if you haven’t 👇
borderlab.eu/blog/bodies-...

#EurAsianBorderLab #BorderStudies #GlobalHealth #DigitalHealth #VolumetricBorders

Gwen Petrina Latenri Tappu, runner-up in our Volumetric Borders essay contest, shows how healthcare🏥 apartheid emerges from the intersection of biological, digital, and geopolitical barriers. Through her essay, she reveals how bodies themselves become border zones.

This logic runs deep in everyday healthcare. Electronic records privilege some symptoms and identities while erasing others. Telemedicine expands access only for those with digital literacy and stable connections...💻

Healthcare systems have long operated as sorting mechanisms, but the pandemic exposed just how political and uneven this sorting is.🌍 Vaccine access was not dictated by medical need but by entrenched infrastructures of wealth and power, leaving many frontline workers in the Global South unprotected.

First article published from the Eur-Asian Border Lab’s special issue on borderland vernaculars - Eur-Asian BorderLab Eur-Asian Lab member Mikel Venhovens has published “Suffocating borderlands: enduring coping mechanisms amidst tight control […]

The issue emerges from our 2024 symposium and examines how ordinary people in borderlands create practical strategies for survival through everyday actions and local knowledge.

🔗 borderlab.eu/news/first-a...

#EurAsianBorderLab #BorderStudies #SpecialIssue #BorderlandVernaculars

This is the first article🥳 from our upcoming special issue “Borderland vernaculars: Coping, resilience, and action in times of crisis,” edited by Lab members Karin Dean, Jussi P. Laine, and Raili Nugin.

New research from our Lab member Mikel Venhovens reveals how ethnic Georgian minorities survive in Abkhazia’s Gal(i) borderlands - caught between systematic suppression and impossible choices.

Bodies, bytes, and borders: Unpacking the volumetric barriers of global healthcare access - Eur-Asian BorderLab This work by Gwen Petrina Latenri Tappu is the first runner-up essay of the Eur-Asian […]

Her closing poem is even more haunting💔: “My name is missing from the dropdown menu, my wound too blurred for the algorithm. They ask for proof of body, but I am already a border.”

🔗Read the full essay: borderlab.eu/blog/bodies-...
#EurAsianBorderLab #BorderStudies #VolumetricBorders #GlobalHealth

Tappu maps three overlapping healthcare borders: political control over bodies, digital divides that exclude millions from telemedicine, and territorial constraints that trap patients on the wrong side of power.

The first runner-up essay from our volumetric borders contest is now live, and it reveals how healthcare has become a battlefield of invisible barriers.🏥

Gwen Petrina Latenri Tappu, a medical student from #Indonesia, was selected from over 300 global submissions for "Bodies, bytes, and borders."

Conference📅: May 18-21, 2026, Fez, Morocco
Abstract deadline🛑: October 15, 2025
🔗Full CFP: colloquemurs.uqam.ca/fr/frontiere...

#EurAsianBorderLab #BorderStudies #GlobalSouth #DecolonialScholarship

For researchers across #Africa, #Asia, #LatinAmerica, and Indigenous communities worldwide, this represents a crucial space to present work on deglobalisation, border fortification, and migration governance from lived experience and non-Western theoretical frameworks.

This conference operates in English, French, and Arabic - recognising that transformative scholarship happens in multiple languages and epistemic traditions. It specifically seeks work that challenges colonial constructs of territorial sovereignty and fixed border regimes.