The Ukrainian-Russian border in cultural imagination, state-building and social experience

The subject of this multidimensional research is the Ukrainian-Russian border as a new (and old) cultural and political construct, its representations and ideologies of cross-border cooperation, and the changing role of this border in post-Soviet statebuilding, in Ukrainian-Russian relations and in European politics, with a special focus on the regional level and the everyday experience of the local population in the Kharkiv-Belgorod region. During the first ten months research was conducted as planned on the three dimensions of the project: geopolitics (role and current state of the border issue in U/R relations and EU politics, perspectives of cross-border cooperation, representations of the new border in the media and in the political and academic discourses); history (contemporary / post-1991 history of the U/R border; regional history of Sloboda Ukraine as a source for the reinvention of a new identity of the border region), and social anthropology (the everyday life of near-border communities). However, some important aspects and issues of the project still have to be studied: 1) comparative cases: a) the Austrian-Hungarian, Czech-Slovak and some other borders; b) the experience of other Euroregions and its relevance for Ukraine; 2) the Soviet and pre-Soviet prehistory of the U/R border, the construction of the U/R border in historiography, geography and political thought; 3) attitudes of the local elite (officials, journalists and businessmen in Kharkiv) dealing with the issue of the U/R border. Moreover, new political developments have emerged during the time of the current research, which also should be addressed: EU politics towards the U/R border (a new "neighborhood strategy" and the pressing issue of illegal migration); regional initiatives (the project of the Euroregion "Slobozhanshchyna", initiated in Kharkiv). Methodology: 1) analysis of the political and juridical documents on the regional, U/R and EU levels; of media and academic discourses; 2) historical research (based on Ukrainian historiography, archive materials and media archives); 3) informal individual interviews and focus group interviews.