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Conferences

Neighbours, Citizens and Borders. The making of Geo-Political Relations and Communities

21 - 25 September 2006 in Lublin (Poland) / Lviv (Ukraine)

The 8th in a long-standing series of conference on borders and border regions will take place in Lublin (Poland) and Lviv (Ukraine) in September 2006. This conference will be organised by the Centre for European Regional and Local Studies (University of Warsaw), the Department of Geography of the Free University of Berlin, the University of Lublin and the Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning (Erkner, Germany). BRIT VIII will convene as the EU faces a new round of enlargement and considers possible future enlargement options. However, it also comes at a time when the not only the EU but also the US, East and South Asia and other areas of the world are seeking to redefine their geopolitical orientations and regional relationships. These processes will impact not only on more global security issues and international relations but also on communities, localities and regions located in border regions.

This conference will be organised in a border region which is a laboratory for new regional partnerships, and thus for the EU's New Neighbourhood policy. For this reason, the "twin" venues of Eastern Poland and Western Ukraine seem both appropriate and timely. However, BRIT VIII will not be a "eurocentric" event. After the great success of the last BRIT conference in Jerusalem we believe that a truly international perspective is needed in order to discuss interrelated problems of geopolitics, security, and borders as well as to debate the complex social construction of borders. We believe that border studies and geopolitics can contribute to understanding the relationships between territory, identity, citizenship, culture and governance. Among the questions to be explored are therefore: how is political community being defined ("bordered") at different spatial scales (regional, national, supranational), and how are these definitions impacting on relationships/co-operation between communities and states?

CONFERENCE TOPICS INCLUDE:

  • Alternative Geopolitics and Regional Co-operation
  • Geopolitics, Borders and Identity Politics
  • Redefining Security in a Multipolar World
  • Borders, Natural Resources and Transnational Governance
  • EU New Neighbourhood Policies and Border Regions
  • Theories and Conceptualisations of "Bordering"
  • The Contribution of European Research Programmes to Understanding Borders
  • The Development of Transnational Civil Society