All quiet on the Eastern border? Bordering practices at the EU Eastern border

In recent years, the eastern part of the European Union and its borders have attracted much more international attention than before. The year 2021 could be marked as a pivotal point in this regard, when the so-called Eastern Border Route became fully operational, and people on the move appeared in large numbers at the Polish, Lithuanian, and Latvian borders, seeking to cross irregularly. This led to the militarisation of the area, affecting later also Estonia and Finland, and the introduction of physical barriers along the border. Yet, the developments at the border remain understudied and undertheorized.

The aim of this session is to respond to the renewed focus on the Eastern border and to understand and conceptualise the recent developments at that border that have so far gathered limited academic attention beyond the legal analysis of pushbacks. The session will focus on historical developments, bordering practices, and various forms of resistance, thereby revealing the processes of border enforcement on the EU’s eastern flank. In particular, the session will critically analyse how the securitisation of external European Eastern borders has developed over the years, how changes to law and practice have been justified, and which actors have been involved in that process and how the access to protection and the rule of law has been affected in result.

This session critically examines the processes that led to the fortification of the Eastern border over the years. Special attention is paid to events after 2021, when those processes have accelerated. The focus includes:

1) the progressive securitisation of the EU Eastern border as a result of the institutionalisation and Europeanization of migration and refugee policies in the EU. The session will show, in particular, the recent shift from understanding migration as a concern for social cohesion, internal security, and public order to characterising it as instrumentalised and constituting an external hybrid threat and, in consequence, an existential threat to the EU and its border states.

2) the rapidly progressing militarisation of the border through the deployment of military forces, armed personnel, and militarised infrastructure to regulate migration flows, effectively merging border security and defence objectives. The session focuses on both material measures—such as fences, barriers, and checkpoints—and operational strategies, including surveillance and military patrolling, characterised by the development of physical infrastructure.

3) criminalisation not only of migration and people on the move themselves, but also of solidarity and activism, as a result of militarisation and politicisation of migration.

4) different forms of resistance to these developments of securitisation, militarisation, and criminalisation, including legal, political, humanitarian (solidarity), and individual forms of resistance and coping.

The session will include selected chapters from the forthcoming edited collection, but will also be partially open for individual submissions. The session will be organised in English.

While border studies have convincingly demonstrated that contemporary bordering practices often extend beyond the Westphalian line of demarcation, recent geopolitical developments at the EU’s eastern borders have been accompanied by a renewed investment in territorial borders and their physical infrastructures. This paper asks how recent material and legal reinforcements of border control, often framed as responses to the alleged instrumentalisation of migration by Russia and Belarus, reshape the significance of the territorial border under the EU border regime.

Drawing on legal geography and an understanding of law as always spatially grounded and materially present (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2015), the paper conceptualises these developments as processes of re-territorialisation (Paasi, 2011) within an otherwise highly externalised EU border regime. Empirically, it analyses examples of reinforced territorial border control: the construction of walls and fences; the closure of border crossing points; the reinforcement of border zones; and laws on entry refusal established through the legal fiction of non-entry under the EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum and in recent Finnish and Polish asylum legislation.

Combining legal doctrinal analysis, spatial theory, maps, and photographic documentation from the Eastern borders of Finland and Poland, the paper argues that these legal and physical infrastructures do not merely reinforce territorial borders. Rather, they contribute to a thickening of the border and establish a spatial distance – a physical and legal disconnection – between people seeking protection and the spaces in which fundamental rights would ordinarily become operative. Individuals arriving via the Eastern Border Route may therefore be physically present at the territorial border of an EU Member State, or even within its territory, while simultaneously remaining disconnected from the scope of fundamental rights protection. In this sense, re-territorialisation reproduces the logics of externalisation that have long characterised the EU border regime, and contributes to new forms of violence and exclusion.

This paper historicises Central and Eastern European (CEE) and Finnish regimes of preventing unauthorised and asylum migration from the Cold War to post‑1990s Europeanisation. It situates the practices of the Soviet Union’s western neighbours – CEE socialist states (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania) and Finland – within broader transformations of migration control, showing how Soviet buffer zones became the EU’s eastern buffers in the 1990s. Using Finnish archival materials and research on CEE/Finnish border regimes (1950s–1990s), the paper identifies the logics by which these buffers blocked unwanted crossings and transitioned from serving Soviet to EU priorities. Buffer zones embodied a layered non‑entry regime combining border, visa and asylum policies, restrictive exit controls and cooperative enforcement, emerging at the intersection of Soviet security imperatives, satellite subordination/navigations and Finnish–Soviet bilateralism. Findings show shifts in European legal harmonisation, the rise of human‑rights conditionality and changing target groups, alongside enduring continuities in pre‑screening, cooperative enforcement and interagency coordination. Together, these dynamics reveal persistent adaptation to the stronger party’s migration‑prevention objectives (the USSR, later the EU), transforming the East–West border regime while sustaining its emphasis on curbing unauthorised and humanitarian crossings, shifting from exit prevention (Soviet era) to entry prevention (EU era).

This chapter examines how crises affect access to asylum within the European Union (EU), focusing on the eastern borders, where the hostile activities of Belarus and Russia in the form of the so-called ‘instrumentalisation of immigration’ have intensified border controls. It shows that, despite Article 18 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights guaranteeing the right to seek asylum, the EU’s Asylum Acquis — specifically, the Dublin Regulation, the Reception Conditions Directive, and the Asylum Procedures Directive — has largely failed to translate normative guarantees into reliable, uniform access in crises. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Belarus 2021–2022 border crisis, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have more than ever exposed the persistent systemic gaps in EU law on asylum. The EU’s eastern Member States, which share land borders with Russia and Belarus, namely Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, have taken a securitised, border-centric response (such as pushbacks, rapid processing, and restricted remedies) that can undermine fundamental rights protections, including non-refoulement and access to legal aid. The chapter argues that these conditions render the right to seek asylum more intangible in practice, despite its formal enshrinement in EU law.

The chapter contends that reforms to EU asylum law must harmonise reception standards, guarantee timely, asylum-focused processing at first contact points, and reform the Dublin framework to alleviate frontline pressures without compromising rights. Stronger EU-wide safeguards — such as independent monitoring, accessible remedies, and crisis-resilient procedures — are essential. Revisions should align the EU Acquis with the 1951 Refugee Convention, reinforce safeguards against displacement and refoulement, and restore solidarity and fair responsibility-sharing among states. The analysis concludes that only a rights-centred, cohesive reform agenda can effectively translate the promises of fundamental rights into practical protection guarantees for asylum seekers, even in times of emergency.

Keywords: European Union (EU), Eastern borders of the EU, right to seek asylum in the EU, limitation or derogation of the right to seek asylum, instrumentalisation of migration

The reintroduction of internal border controls within the Schengen area has transitioned from an exceptional safeguard to a “new normal”, fundamentally altering the landscape of European mobility. This paper analyses the recent re-bordering of the Polish-German frontier, interpreting it through the lenses of populism and the historical arc of EU enlargement. Following Poland’s 2007 entry into the Schengen Area, the Polish-German border transitioned from the EU’s external frontier to an internal symbol of integration. However, the border never truly disappeared; instead, it was internalised through broad interpretations of Article 23 of the Schengen Borders Code. This “control in motion” – characterised by internal and mobile checks – turned the entire territory into a border zone long before the formal reinstatement of fixed checks.

The paper explores how the 2021 humanitarian crisis at the EU’s Eastern border with Belarus served as the primary catalyst for the formal closure of the Polish-German border by Germany in 2023 and Poland in 2025. While official justifications cite migratory pressure, statistical evidence reveals that irregular crossings remain marginal compared to political rhetoric. This demonstrates that populist performance – rather than objective pressure – drives these closures. Populist actors exploit “emotional gold”, specifically the politics of fear and anti-German sentiments, to frame migration as an existential threat to the “pure people” and national sovereignty. The emergence of civil border patrols or militias further illustrates the internalisation of historical traumas and the populist mobilisation of fear against a perceived “abdication” of the state and subordination to an untrustworthy neighbouring country or the EU. First, this fear concerned the EU’s Eastern border, but more recently it “moved” to the border between Poland and Germany. The paper is based on empirical studies regarding migration and border control in Poland conducted between 2015 and 2019, supplemented by qualitative analysis of the Polish political discourse in the post-2021 context.

This paper explores how instrumentalised migration has become part of Finnish emergency law. Most notably, the Emergency Powers Act was amended in 2022 to provide powers necessary for dealing with cases of mass migration. I will analyse Finnish security documents and travaux préparatoires of relevant acts to understand this development. The paper begins by looking at the origin of instrumentalised migration as a security concept. As I will argue, a relevant shift takes place in late 2010s, when Finnish security documents begin to understand the causes mass migration as being politically motivated. Before this, mass migration was seen as being caused by external reasons, such as natural disasters or political turmoil. However, especially after the Belarus – Schengen border crisis, Finnish security officials begin to predict that aggressor states could redirect or even cause migration flows to exert political pressure on Finland. This shift is visible in what are seen as the main challenges in cases of mass migration. Before instrumentalised migration became a prominent security concept, the main issue seems to have been insufficient registration capacities. In contrast, with instrumentalised migration the issue becomes how to limit entry and, even, close down the border. As I will point out, this shift in understanding mass migration as a security issue is reflected by legislation. The travaux préparatoires of the Emergency Powers Act already consider mass migration as a potential emergency in 2008. However, at that point it was determined that no extraordinary powers were needed. In contrast, in 2022, the government proposal establishes that emergency powers to stop mass migration are necessary. My paper seeks to document this legislative development and understand, in general, how the securitisation of a phenomenon (re-)directs Finnish emergency law.

The Eastern border of the European Union has emerged as a critical site of both migration management and regional security. Following a series of geopolitical crises—including the Belarusian instrumentalisation of migration in 2021 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022—EU member states bordering Russia and Belarus have implemented a range of measures to assert control over migration flows while reinforcing national and regional collective security. All of the above led to the rapidly progressing intertwining of migration management and militarisation at the EU’s Eastern border, which we call “militarigration”.  The term refers to the deployment of military forces, armed personnel, and militarised infrastructure to regulate migration flows, effectively merging border security and defence objectives. It encompasses both material measures—such as fences, barriers, and checkpoints—and operational strategies, including surveillance, Frontex deployments, and military patrolling. The concept highlights how the militarisation of border controls transforms migration governance into a security-oriented, state-centric practice, in which the management of human mobility is inseparable from responding to existential threats to the nation. We argue that militarigration is the next step in the long-time observed securitisation of both migration and people on the move. The paper aims to present the concept of militarigration and how it differs from securitisation. The example will be the EU Eastern Border with a special focus on Poland.

There is a rapidly progressing intertwining of migration management and militarisation at the EU’s Eastern border, which we call “militarigration”. Given current developments, especially in Poland, we aim to present this concept and outline how it differs from securitisation.