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The land border between Russia and the European Union is one of the longest land borders in the world, with very considerable trade flowing across the border in both directions. This book examines the nature of the EU-Russia border, and the issues connected with its management. It describes the territories and the societies on each side of the border, discusses the challenges which confront border management, including migration and criminal activities, and explores how people on both sides perceive each other and perceive threats and security issues. It concludes by assessing achievements to date in managing the border and by assessing continuing unresolved challenges.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were high hopes of Russia's \"modernisation\" and rapid political and economic integration with the EU. But now, given its own policies of national development, Russia appears to have 'limits to integration'. Today, much European political discourse again evokes East/West civilisational divides and antagonistic geopolitical interests in EU-Russia relations. This book provides a carefully researched and timely analysis of this complex relationship and examines whether this turn in public debate corresponds to local-level experience - particularly in border areas where the European Union and Russian Federation meet. This multidisciplinary book - covering geopolitics, international relations, political economy and human geography - argues that the concept 'limits to integration' has its roots in geopolitical reasoning; it examines how Russian regional actors have adapted to the challenges of simultaneous internal and external integration, and what kind of strategies they have developed in order to meet the pressures coming across the border and from the federal centre. It analyses the reconstitution of Northwest Russia as an economic, social and political space, and the role cross-border interaction has had in this process. The book illustrates how a comparative regional perspective offers insights into the EU-Russia relationship: even if geopolitics sets certain constraints to co-operation, and market processes have led to conflict in cross-border interaction, several actors have been able to take initiative and create space for increasing cross-border integration in the conditions of Russia's internal reconstitution.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were high hopes of Russia’s \"modernisation\" and rapid political and economic integration with the EU. But now, given its own policies of national development, Russia appears to have ‘limits to integration’. Today, much European political discourse again evokes East/West civilisational divides and antagonistic geopolitical interests in EU-Russia relations. This book provides a carefully researched and timely analysis of this complex relationship and examines whether this turn in public debate corresponds to local-level experience – particularly in border areas where the European Union and Russian Federation meet. This multidisciplinary book - covering geopolitics, international relations, political economy and human geography - argues that the concept ‘limits to integration’ has its roots in geopolitical reasoning; it examines how Russian regional actors have adapted to the challenges of simultaneous internal and external integration, and what kind of strategies they have developed in order to meet the pressures coming across the border and from the federal centre. It analyses the reconstitution of Northwest Russia as an economic, social and political space, and the role cross-border interaction has had in this process. The book illustrates how a comparative regional perspective offers insights into the EU-Russia relationship: even if geopolitics sets certain constraints to co-operation, and market processes have led to conflict in cross-border interaction, several actors have been able to take initiative and create space for increasing cross-border integration in the conditions of Russia’s internal reconstitution. Heikki Eskelinen is Professor (regional studies) at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland. Ilkka Liikanen is Professor (Border and Russian studies) at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland. James W. Scott is Professor of Regional and Border Studies at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland. 1. On the Edge of Neighbourhood: Regional Dimensions of the EU–Russia Interface Heikki Eskelinen, Ilkka Liikanen, and James Wesley Scott Part 1. Northwest Russia: Regional Contexts of Political Integration 2. Federal Reforms, Interregional Relations, and Political Integration in Northwest Russia Elena Belokurova and Maria Nozhenko 3. Regional Community-Building and Cross-Border Interaction Elena Belokurova and Maria Nozhenko Part 2: Processes and Actors of Cross-Border Interaction 4. Geopolitics and the Market: Borderland Economies in the Making Heikki Eskelinen 5. The West and Co-operation with the West in Late and Post-Soviet Ethnic Mobilization in Russian Karelia Ilkka Liikanen 6. Crossing the Borders of Finnish and Northwest Russian Labour Markets Pertti Koistinen and Oxana Krutova 7. Re-connecting Territorialities? – Spatial Planning Co-operation Between Eastern Finnish and Russian Subnational Governments Matti Fritsch 8. Russia’s Oil and Gas Infrastructure: New Routes, New Actors Dmitry Zimin 9. Civil Society Organizations as Drivers of Cross-Border Interaction: On Whose Terms, For Which Purpose? Jussi Laine and Andrey Demidov Part 3: Northwest Russia: An Arena of Socio-Cultural Transformation 10. Company Towns on the Border: The Post-Soviet Transformation of Svetogorsk and Kostomuksha Dmitry Zimin, Juha Kotilainen, and Evgenia Prokhorova 11. Repositioning a Border Town: Sortavala Alexander Izotov 12. Informal Transitions: Northwest Russian Youth Between ‘Westernization’ and Soviet Legacies Pirjo Jukarainen 13. Karelia: A Finnish–Russian Borderland on the Edge of Neighbourhood Vladimir Kolossov and James Wesley Scott

\"In the late nineteenth century, the meeting of the Russian and Qing empires in Central Asia radically transformed local Muslim communities. Along this new frontier, a political space emerged that was shaped by the interplay of categories of imperial and spiritual loyalty, institutions of autonomy and extraterritoriality, and complex negotiations between rulers and ruled. As exiles or émigrés, traders or seasonal laborers, a diverse diaspora of Muslims from Chinese Turkistan came into being on tsarist territory, linking China's northwest to intellectual and political trends among the Muslims of Russia. This book explores the history of transnational and national discourses of communal identity within this community, focusing on the Russian Revolution and Civil War, from which emerged the new notion of a Uyghur nation as a political rallying point. In a detailed study of this poorly known but formative period, the book eschews national teleology to instead show how a shifting alliance of constituencies with ties to Xinjiang, often at loggerheads in the fractious politics of the Soviet 1920s, nevertheless reached an unlikely consensus on the existence of a Uyghur nation. It traces efforts to mobilize this diaspora to intervene in the emerging Soviet structures of national autonomy, and to spread the revolution to Xinjiang. Delving into archives from across the Eurasian continent, and fully informed by local Uyghur sources, it offers the first study of modern Central Asia to span the historiographical divide between Russian and Chinese Turkistan. The book's bottom-up perspective encourages a reconsideration of dominant state-centered understandings of nation-building in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.\"--Provided by publisher.

China and Russia are rising economic and political powers that share thousands of miles of border. Yet, despite their proximity, their practical, local interactions with each other â and with their third neighbour Mongolia â are rarely discussed. The three countries share a boundary, but their traditions, languages and worldviews are remarkably different. Frontier Encounters presents a wide range of views on how the borders between these unique countries are enacted, produced, and crossed. It sheds light on global uncertainties: Chinaâ s search for energy resources and the employment of its huge population, Russiaâ s fear of Chinese migration, and the precarious economic independence of Mongolia as its neighbours negotiate to extract its plentiful resources. Bringing together anthropologists, sociologists and economists, this timely collection of essays offers new perspectives on an area that is currently of enormous economic, strategic and geo-political relevance. This collective volume is the outcome of a network project funded by the ESRC (RES-075-25_0022) entitled \"Where Empires Meet: The Border Economies of Russia, China and Mongoliaâ . The project, based at the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit (University of Cambridge), ran from 28 January 2010 to 27 January 2011. That project formed the foundation for a new and ongoing research project \"The life of borders: where China and Russia meet\" which commenced in October 2012.

This book provides an answer to the mystery of why no peace treaty has yet been signed between Japan and Russia after more than sixty years since the end of World War Two. The author, a leading authority on Japanese-Russian diplomatic history, was trained at the Russian Institute of Columbia University. This volume contributes to our understanding of not only the intricacies of bilateral relations between Moscow and Tokyo, but, more generally, of Russia's and Japan's modes of foreign policy formation. The author also discusses the U.S. factor, which helped make Russia and Japan distant neighbors, and the threat from China, which might help these countries come closer in the near future. It would be hardly possible to discuss the future prospects of Northeast Asia without having first read this book.