Kirkenes: An Industrial Site Reinvented as a Border Town

Abstract

1This article analyses the transformation of Kirkenes, a small town on the Russian–Norwegian border, from an industrial town to a border town. Kirkenes was established as a harbour for an iron-ore mining venture in what today is the municipality of Sør-Varanger. This industry closed down during the 1990s. The article describes how Kirkenes has been transformed within “bordered” relationships of civic society, business and a combination of high-level and local political activities. Being a border town and a centre in the Barents Region is the hegemonic narrative of today. The manifold transformations have led to a situation where Kirkenes has become “Russianized”, though local actors struggle with how to handle this aspect of local development and the meaning of the place. The article also investigates to what degree the transformations have changed local identity. The focus is on how identities are dealt with, whether they are seen as immanent and essential cultural traits, or as something that tends to be changed and adapted to the situation. Based on the concept of narrative identities, there are reasons to believe that there are strong identities based on both public narratives relating to local history and nature and metanarratives about globalization and cross-border communities.

Keywords:

• Transition
• Industrial transformation
• Restructuring
• Identity
• Border
• Border town
• Mining town
• Kirkenes
• Barents Region

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Professor Einar Niemi from the Department of History at the University of Tromsø for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

1. This is a significantly revised version of an article published in Nyseth and Granås 2007 “Place-reinvention – Dynamics and Governance Perspectives”, Stockholm: Nordregio.

2. This conflict was not very different from today's Norwegian–Russian boundary disputes in the Barents Sea (Nielsen, 2005).

3. No official statistics exist to confirm the exact number, which was specified in interviews with representatives from the industry

4. Sør-Varanger Kommunes Internasjonale engasjement. Sør-Varanger Kommune, 3 December 2001.

5. “Pikene på broen” is the name of an Edvard Munch painting from 1901. The English name of this painting is “Girls on a Jetty”. With regard to the project group in Kirkenes, we have translated the name as “The Girls on the Bridge”.

6. Since 2004, this has been a term used for the northern parts of Scandinavia and Russia and the ocean areas to the north, in Norwegian Nordområdene.