All quiet on the ‘Eastern front’? Controlling transit migration in Latvia and Lithuania

ABSTRACT

While much of current debate on European border control focuses on the reinforcements of Europe’s Southern and South-eastern borders, the Baltic States, traditionally countries of emigration to Western Europe, are experiencing their own challenges in adapting their border regime to handle novel transit migration. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in the Lithuanian and Latvian State Border Guard Services, tasked with securing the Europe Union’s Eastern external borders and curtailing migrants’ onward movement to Western Europe, this paper sheds light on the meanings and practices of ‘borderwork’ in an underexplored region. The article asks: How is the Baltic border regime performed by State Border Guards, what meanings do they attribute to these borders, and what can this tell us about the ever-changing nature of the European border regime? For border guards, the complex landscape of de – and reterritorialised Schengen borders primarily serve as tools for manifesting their belonging to ‘Europe’ and their geopolitical distancing from Russia. Only recently did their borderwork become politicised in the context of migration. The Baltic case sheds light on the diverse manifestations and meanings of borders, which go beyond the mobile populations they are declared to be set up to control.

KEYWORDS:

• Baltic States
• migration
• border control
• street-level bureaucracy
• policing

Acknowledgments

This research has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation Project No. 153225.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The borderscapes concept enables us to grasp the complexity of borders and border spaces, being mobile, relational, temporal and spatial (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007, xx). Moreover, it highlights the negotiations and contestations over the meaning of borders and the normative issues of inclusion and exclusion that they actualise (Brambilla 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation Project No. 153225 [Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung].