Everyday Europeanization and Bottom-Up Geopolitics at the Ukrainian-Polish Border

Abstract

ABSTRACT Relations between Ukraine and Poland, despite the burden of a difficult past and sometimes diverging economic interests, have proved their geostrategic significance for both sides. The importance of the local dimension of these relations – multiple horizontal ties and cooperation projects, mass cross-border movement, dense social networks and transnational family relationships – became particularly clear in spring 2022, when the border turned into a life-saving corridor and a site of everyday solidarity. This article explores how the Ukrainian-Polish border, historically a product of great power deals and nowadays an external border of the NATO and the European Union, is lived, experienced, and perceived from below in two Ukrainian near-border towns, Sambir and Chervonohrad. The article is based on a conceptual approach that combines ‘everyday Europeanization’ and ‘bottom-up geopolitics’ with the notion of the border as a historically multi-layered and dynamic phenomenon. Drawing on interviews with local elites and residents, participant observation, and content analysis of the local media, as well as focus groups conducted in 2021 and in 2023, I show how the geopolitical conflict between Russia and the West is experienced in a region where it strongly resonates with the traumatic past and where the livelihood of the population depends on cross-border small trade and labour migration.