The Centre for Geopolitics, Peace, and Security (GPS) at UiT The Arctic University of Norway invites all interested to attend a seminar featuring four lectures on the topic of borders, scheduled for 11 June 2026.
Lines that Divide: Exploring Borders and Their Impact
Ekaterina Mikhailova
Associate Professor in Border Studies, Centre for Geopolitics, Peace and Security, UiT
Border Violence and Its Strategic Erasure in Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan Relations
During the first fifteen years of independence, the Turkmenistan-Uzbekistan border transformed from being a fully open administrative boundary within a single political and socio-economic system (the Soviet Union) to, by 2002-2006, becoming an alienated international border – a militarized zone prone to conflicts. The borderland population suffered from policies implemented by both the Turkmen and Uzbek governments. Discrimination against the Uzbek minority on the Turkmen side of the border was particularly severe, varying in form from job dismissals to imprisonment, resettlement, and deportation.
In the late 2010s and early 2020s, bilateral relations of the two states took a different course. Joint cultural celebratory events between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have multiplied, including some held in their shared borderland. These events contribute to the narrative of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan as two brotherly nations and eternal friends. This narrative strategically erases the recent history of border tensions and hostilities and distances from everyday experiences of co-ethnics across the border who are more often treated as "others" rather than "brothers". The presentation will unpack the myth of “eternal friendship” between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, the myth-making efforts and its target audiences - those far away from the shared border.
Αntigone Heraclidou
Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Geopolitics, Peace and Security, UiT
Nicosia’s Buffer Zone: division, dialogue, and memory keeping
Since 1956, Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus has been traversed by a dividing line; variously taking the form of a roughly made wire barrier, a guarded crossing, or a UN patrolled buffer zone. The Green Line-as it is called- extends approximately 180 km across the island. In some parts of old Nicosia, it is only a few meters wide, while in other areas it stretches several kilometers; yet neither side permits access to it. This dividing line sometimes is called a border, a term that is widely rejected by many Cypriots across the divide, as it is neither a fixed geographical boundary nor a legally recognized one. However, much like borders, the buffer
zone has for decades been a multifaced area which serving as a place for protest, memory-keeping, and a fertile space for dialogue and cooperation. It is a barrier, as Emily Bereskin put it, “whose management and symbolic interpretation can motivate intercommunal cooperation – just as it can incite conflict”. This presentation offers an overview of the history of the buffer zone in Nicosia, and examines how it has been used since its establishment, as a space for dialogue, memory keeping and division over time.
Olga Cielemęcka
Postdoctoral Researcher, Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland
Another Brick in the Wall? A Material-Discursive Reading of the Resurgence of Border Fences in Europe
This presentation examines the resurgence of hard borders in Europe through the cases of recently constructed border fences on the Poland-Belarus and Finland-Russia borders. In the context of intensified regional tensions, return of war to Europe, rising support for the far right and growing anti-migration sentiments, we observe renewed political support for fortified borders. Using a material-discursive approach, this paper shows that border fences are symbolic devices that materialize and channel contemporary political discourses and affective societal realities. While presented as effective tools for managing migration and safeguarding sovereignty these structures create an illusion of control and safety that obscures or even intensifies deeper structural and political challenges. At the same time, this paper takes seriously the materiality of border fences (e.g. physical presence, technological aspects, apparent permanence, and environmental impacts) to track how it facilitates the exercise of state power, territoriality, and exclusion, while at the same time evading and destabilizing it. This paper is part of the project “Not just a fence: Disentangling the boundaries of order, logic, and control”.
Antti Tiilikainen
Doctoral researcher, Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland
Militarization and borders – focus on violence
The militarization of borders is usually attached to issues such deploying military forces to the border to do the work of border guards, using military hardware for border protection and applying military logics to borders. However, this sort of conceptualization hides the underlying deeply rooted connections between what I call the violence apparatus: police, border guards, and the military. The focus of militarization on organizational background (civil-military), and the faulty binary that follows hides their central logic of violence. Through violence it is possible to better understand why these organizations engage in cooperation and I contend that the conceptual lens of militarization lets the police and border guards off the hook by pointing to militarization as the origins of the violence they conduct. By engaging in analysis through the lens of violence, threatening with it, preparing to use it and using it, it places agency at the individual and the organization and the decisions to up- or downregulate violence as deliberate decision. Violence, its control and regulation, are central planning tenets of all three organizations and in my presentation, I will present this novel analytical viewpoint.