Everyday life in the shadow of the border: the Polish-Russian borderland since the war in Ukraine – recognizing the phenomenon

ABSTRACT

The local community in the Polish-Russian border area has been experiencing constant closures and openings since the delimitation of the border. Despite that, the residents used the border as a resource until the outbreak of war in Ukraine. All actions of the central authorities restricting cross-border mobility in the Polish-Russian borderland were treated by the residents as a temporary impediment, to which they were, to some extent, accustomed as they lived in a region with strong exposure to geopolitical risks. With the outbreak of war, the Polish-Russian border area became an isolated border region. Residents of the Polish-Russian borderland face the challenge of reorganizing their daily lives and counteracting the negative effects of permanent isolation. This article seeks to investigate how the Russian-Ukrainian conflict affects the daily lives of these residents through a series of expert interviews.

KEYWORDS:

• Polish-Russian border area
• Kaliningrad
• the war in Ukraine
• border
• re-bordering
• daily life

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this article, Kaliningraders means residents of Kaliningrad Oblast.

2. In her study, the author deliberately omits the activities of the Kaliningrad Oblast authorities because of the limitation of their decision-making capacity due to their dependence on the central Russian authorities (see Oldberg 2009).

3. In this article, the Polish border area is defined as a strip of one county directly adjacent to the state border. The initial phase of empirical research showed that the economy of these local governments is entirely dependent on the degree of openness of the Polish-Russian border.

4. The expert group for Kaliningrad Oblast does not constitute a representative sample. The operation of the closed border, however, together with the reluctance to participate in online interviews among residents of Kaliningrad Oblast, makes it virtually impossible to conduct research in the enclave. The author, however, considered it reasonable to include the Kaliningrad issue in this article, as the study involved academics, journalists, and teachers – a group whose general knowledge of the current situation in the enclave, together with available statistical information and scientific studies, allows certain regularities to be observed.

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Notes on contributors

Dominika Studzińska

Dominika Studzińska is a geographer. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Socio-Economic Geography in Gdańsk, Poland. Her research interests focus on border studies, regional development, and migration processes.