FACULTY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY | Seminar
GP seminar: Sara Svensson: "Resilience-building at NATO’s eastern borders"
Wednesday 14 May, 13:15 - 15:00
Hybrid meeting, join on Zoom
NI:C0933, 9th floor seminar room, Niagara or Zoom
Resilience-building at NATO’s eastern borders: the case of Hungarian borderlands
Welcome to GP Seminar with Sara Svensson, Halmstad University.
About the speaker:
Sara Svensson is Associate Professor and Programme Director of the Transformation, Innovation and Norm Sciences (TRAINS) Research Programme at Halmstad University (Sweden). She takes a special research interest in policy formation and governance structures in European cross-border regions. Dr Svensson is Associate Editor of the Peace and Democracy Section of the journal Frontiers in Political Science, and Regional Editor of the Journal of Borderlands Studies. She holds a PhD in Public policy/Political science from Central European University (Budapest, Hungary), an MA in Political science from the same university (1999), and a BA in journalism from Stockholm University (1997). The paper presented at the seminar draws on co-written work under development with Peter Balogh, Assistant Professor at the Dept. of Social and Economic Geography at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary). He is also Research Fellow at HUN-REN CERS Institute for Regional Studies (Pécs, Hungary).
The paper analyzes resilience-formation in borderlands and its relation to societal security. Through investigating the case of regions located at the Hungarian borders, with special focus on the Ukrainian-Hungarian borderland, an argument is made for a nested borderland perspective which sees this as an increasingly cross-border connected region in the context of the much larger NATO Eastern flank.
The paper starts with a theoretical discussion on resilience and how it can be conceptualized in a borderland setting. It then relates this to the notions of trust, geography, and time. It continues with a scenario-based analysis of how resilience might develop in the short- and long-term in the selected border region, and the implication for NATO policy-makers at different levels of government. It concludes with the argument that resilience-building needs attention to the sub-national level in general, and borderlands in particular.
