Book description
What happens when a region accustomed to violent shifts in borders is
subjected to a new, peaceful partitioning? Has the European Union
spent the last decade creating a new Iron Curtain at its fringes?
Building Fortress Europe: The Polish-Ukrainian Frontier
examines these questions from the perspective of the EU's new eastern
external boundary. Since the Schengen Agreement in 1985, European
states have worked together to create a territory free of internal
borders and with heavily policed external boundaries. In 2004 those
boundaries shifted east as the EU expanded to include eight
postsocialist countries-including Poland but excluding neighboring
Ukraine. Through an analysis of their shared frontier, Building
Fortress Europe provides an ethnographic examination of the
human, social, and political consequences of developing a specialized,
targeted, and legally advanced border regime in the enlarged EU.
Based on fieldwork conducted with border guards, officials, and
migrants shuttling between Poland and Ukraine as well as extensive
archival research, Building Fortress Europe shows how people in
the two countries are adjusting to living on opposite sides of a new
divide. Anthropologist Karolina S. Follis argues that the policing of
economic migrants and asylum seekers is caught between the
contradictory imperatives of the European Union's border security,
economic needs of member states, and their declared commitment to
human rights. The ethnography explores the lives of migrants, and
their patterns of mobility, as framed by these contradictions. It
suggests that only a political effort to address these tensions will
lead to the creation of fairer and more humane border policies.
"A very well written, authoritative, and clear piece of work.
It is a book that fills a gap-while there are many books within the
social sciences on new borders and new migrations, few present such a
finely honed mixture of sociological analysis and ethnographic case
study."-Frances Pine, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Karolina S. Follis has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and
the National University of Ireland, Maynooth and is currently affiliated
with the Law School at Lancaster University.
