The Center for Regional and Borderlands Studies and the Department of the Sociology of Borderland at the Institute of Sociology are co-organising the 2nd Congress of the Researchers of Borders and Borderlands “Borders and Borderlands – Back in the Spotlight”, Białystok, 7-9 September 2026.
Borders and borderlands are back in the spotlight. They are more intensely present than before in the media and in reports produced by institutions enhancing our anxieties about the future. Complex constructs and sophisticated concepts are proposed by researchers hoping to capture the meaning and multifaceted nature of borders. The enormity of the task is often daunting. This is due to the inherent ontological elusiveness of borders and borderlands phenomena.
This elusiveness is reflected, for example, in the recent rise of the paradigm which proposes to think of borderlands as a line of defence against a possible attack launched from beyond the eastern borders of the EU and NATO. While this scenario attracts the attention of the military it also, willy-nilly, marks these lands with an aura of uncertainty leading to the ebb of tourists and investors. It resurrects the archaic imaginary of borderlands as a bastion, redoubt, field of fire, a no man’s land.
This elusiveness calls for ever new control measures deployed on the land, sea, and air borders of the EU in order to monitor not only migration corridors but also activities of hostile forces. These measures are often simultaneously intended to assuage social unrest, neutralize far-right and populist movements and their antagonism towards immigrants, and lower the temperature of the debate around the multicrisis. While social and political reactions may vary the only guaranteed result of these processes is a drop in transborder interactions.
It was this elusiveness that turned the Polish-Belarusian borderland, hitherto witness to multiscalar transborder interactions, into an arena of struggle for the life of arrivals from distant places. Yes, today, this Polish-Belarusian borderland would better be called the ‘Euro-refugee’ borderland or one simply called ‘civilizational’, but in a broader sense than its original, i.e. Catholic-Orthodox, meaning.
All this, in its complexity, entanglement and unpredictability, calls for in-depth, primarily pedagogically oriented reflection on a more effective form of intercultural education. After all, the gap between what experts preach and what other segments of society know is widening dramatically; and this is accompanied by a decline in the value of this knowledge in the eyes of the latter, which may be an even more serious problem.
However, even if this is the case and even if it is a more general problem that goes beyond the scope of border(lands) studies, we would still like to invite you to another stage of reflection of this kind. Reflection that relates to the above-mentioned categories and goes beyond them; reflection that is in-depth, multidimensional, open to the perspectives of anthropology, cultural studies, economics, geography, history, law, literary studies, pedagogy, philosophy, political science, sociology, but also based on transdisciplinary approaches – migration, narrative studies, discourse studies, and others; reflection that can stimulate imagination, give hope, and inspire action; reflection relating to various places around the globe, but for which – as is obvious – the unique socio-cultural environment of Poland’s eastern borderlands (recently particularly dynamic and attracting attention), the multi-ethnic region of Podlasie and its capital city will provide the perfect setting. More broadly, our goal is to further integrate the international and interdisciplinary community of border(lands) studies researchers and to further institutionalise their activities.
Conference website:
