Trust, Belonging, and Migration in Nordic Peripheral Border Regions

The session invites contributions from a range of cross-border contexts, including the Finland–Sweden border, the Finland–Norway border, and connections between Finland and Estonia. These regions provide valuable insights into how borders are lived and experienced in everyday practices such as employment, access to services, community participation, and cross-border mobility. By broadening the geographical scope, the session seeks to encourage comparative perspectives and interdisciplinary dialogue.

In rural and peripheral border regions, trust becomes a crucial resource for navigating daily life. It influences access to employment, social networks, and institutional support systems. At the same time, trust is not fixed; it is continuously built, negotiated, and sometimes challenged through experiences of recognition, exclusion, and inequality. Immigrant women’s experiences are particularly important in this context, as they often engage with multiple social roles and institutional structures while contributing to local economies and communities.

The session approaches trust as a dynamic and relational process shaped by gender, mobility, and local socio-economic conditions. It examines how trust operates across multiple levels, including interpersonal relations, community networks, institutional encounters, and cross-border interactions. In doing so, it highlights the complexities of belonging and integration in non-urban contexts.

Trust is a central condition of social cohesion, yet it can become deeply contested when societies are confronted with perceived threats. This paper examines how antagonistic threat narratives shape trust, mistrust and boundaries of belonging, asking how particular groups come to be constructed as sources of societal insecurity and how such constructions affect relations between citizens, institutions and imagined communities.

The paper draws on the KOMKRIS project (Governance and Resilience under Antagonistic Threats in the Nordic-Baltic Region), which examines how governance systems and civil society actors anticipate, interpret and respond to antagonistic threats, and how these responses may reinforce or undermine societal trust and regional resilience. I focus in particular on the communicative dimension of antagonism: how political and societal actors construct threats through narratives that distinguish between a supposedly trustworthy “us” and groups represented as threatening, disloyal or incompatible with the social order.

Methodologically, the paper draws on qualitative analysis of political and public discourse in the Nordic-Baltic context, examining how threat narratives mobilise categories of belonging and how these narratives circulate across different actors and arenas. Rather than treating distrust simply as an outcome of polarisation, I approach it as a potentially productive political resource: distrust can be actively cultivated, directed towards particular groups or institutions, and used to legitimise exclusionary understandings of membership and belonging.

I argue that antagonistic threat narratives can transform questions of migration and social difference into questions of security, trustworthiness and loyalty. In doing so, they do not merely express existing divisions but actively participate in producing the boundaries of the political community. At the same time, responses to perceived threats may themselves reproduce antagonistic distinctions, creating a difficult tension between security governance and the preservation of societal trust.

The paper therefore contributes to discussions of trust and belonging by conceptualising societal resilience not simply as the capacity to withstand threats, but also as the capacity to resist processes of antagonisation that undermine the social relations on which resilience depends.

Keywords: trust; distrust; antagonistic threats; belonging; migration; societal resilience; Nordic-Baltic region

Finland’s ageing, migration-dependent border regions urgently need migrant workers, yet do not always recognise them. This paper examines how Asian migrant women build belonging in this gap, in the Kemi–Tornio region on the Finland–Sweden border. It develops the concept of conditional belonging: belonging is not granted by arrival, a residence permit or a job, but has to be earned again and again through work, language, recognition of skills and, crucially, trust.

Trust is central to this process. For women navigating a new labour market and unfamiliar institutions, trust shapes whether they can find work, reach the right services, and feel accepted locally. It is not fixed but continuously built, tested and sometimes broken through everyday experiences of recognition and exclusion. The paper argues that belonging is often decided earlier than migration research assumes — in the first weeks after arrival, in whether a woman can learn how systems work, understand what she is entitled to, and find someone willing to help.

The study is qualitative and ethnographic, drawing on life-history interviews and fieldwork with Asian migrant women, conducted where possible in participants’ own languages. The northern, cross-border setting is analytically revealing: services are thin, cultural expectations of who “fits” are strong, and for some women daily life stretches across the border into Sweden, so trust and belonging are negotiated across two states at once.

By centring immigrant women in a peripheral border region, the paper places trust at the heart of Nordic debates on migration, retention and regional sustainability. It shows that being needed is not the same as being trusted — and that belonging is earned through trust, built and tested condition by condition. Understanding how migrant women build this trust, and how institutions extend or withhold it, is essential to keeping the people these regions depend on.

This paper discusses how belonging and sense of home is developed when migrants settle in rural and peripheral regions where population and the public service network is declining. Moreover, it examines how mobilities are entangled with the futures of labour and care in rural regions. Finnish rural regions have since 1990s been destinations of seasonal workers and later year-around workers in green industries. More recently, asylum seekers have been temporarily hosted in reception centres within rural communities. Since 2022, Ukrainian refugees have settled down around Finland, often in regions where they used to take on seasonal agricultural work. In addition, students and workers are increasingly recruited from abroad to the care sector. Migration is sometimes viewed as a solution to the depopulation and need for labour in rural regions, especially in agricultural, service, and care sectors. In the context of care, migrants may be encouraged to fill the gap in health and care workforce, and on the other, migrants themselves are humans with aging and ailing bodies who need health care services as well as support in their over-generational, reproductive duties. Drawing on interviews with earlier and more recently migrated residents in Savo and Ostrobothnia regions, this paper will examine these linkages in the context where the welfare service network is scarcer than in cities and reliance on personal networks may be more difficult to sustain yet all the more needed. Adopting an intersectional perspective the paper examines these themes through changing situations vis à vis health, financial situation, and
reproductive duties. Through this lens, the paper seeks to address the question of how migrants navigate their sense of home and belonging within evolving rural landscapes.
Keywords: belonging, care, labour, sense of home, rural migration