Recently, even readers unfamiliar with the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands could learn about Volhynia thanks to Wojciech Smarzowski’s eponymous movie from 2016. Upon its release, it caused diplomatic ructions between Ukraine and Poland—although, alongside gruesome images of the mass killings that Ukrainians perpetrated against their Polish neighbors during World War II, it also presents no less sadistic or indiscriminate acts of revenge. Kathryn Ciancia’s book on the interwar Polish “civilizing mission” concludes more or less where the movie picks up the thread. On the whole, however, she is skeptical about how far the dynamics that she traces in her book had set the scene for the wartime cruelties.The treaty putting an end to the Soviet-Polish war of 1920–21 divided up the historical province of Volhynia between the two states, with the bigger slice going to Poland. After the annexation of one county from Polesia, the Polish province extended to almost 36,000 square kilometers. Poles saw it as part of their historical-national space: “civilizationally, if not demographically, Polish” (120). At the same time, they also considered it the second most backward province of their young state. They disseminated the same Orientalizing tropes about its majority Orthodox rural population that pre-World War I German discourses had reserved to Poles: aside from being unwashed and illiterate, Ukrainian peasants were also depicted as deceitful, superstitious, hard-drinking, violent, and all too fecund. Jews, who populated the region’s small and unsanitary urban settlements, fared even worse in this hierarchy. They were regarded as hidebound, even anachronistic trammels on progress. Ciancia’s book, then, gives a panoramic but granular account of how competing Polish interwar elites tried to Westernize and—in different and often incompatible senses—Polonize Volhynians.The book follows a broadly chronological sweep. The initial period, until Józef Piłsudski’s coup in 1926, was dominated by the ethnicist ideology of the National Democrats (ND, known colloquially as Endecja), which gave way to a more civic understanding of Polishness for the duration of the Sanacja regime, only to return in a right-wing slide following Piłsudski’s death in 1935. National Democrats sought to assimilate what they saw as a formless mass of pre-national Ruthenians, while Sanacja, represented in Volhynia by the governorship of Henryk Józewski (1928–38), promoted civic loyalty to a multi-ethnic Poland, which could reconcile the furthering of Ukrainian literacy and alignment with a Ukrainian national culture. This ideological seesaw lends the book a tripartite structure, even though Ciancia also emphasizes the continuities. She successfully organizes her material into thematic chapters within this loose chronological framework.Chapter 2 is devoted to the early discourses and policies of integrating the kresy [frontier]. It highlights the perceptions and self-perceptions of the military settlers who moved into Volhynia in the early 1920s, the constructions of foreignness from the opposing perspectives of newcomers and locals, and the civilizational hierarchies that more western Polish elite groups applied in nested circles to their eastern compatriots. Notably, Endecja-voting Poles from Poznań claimed patronage over the kresy, guided by the idea that Poles from the former Russian partition stood too much under the corrupting influence of Russians and Jews. As regards Polish-speaking Catholic landowners from Volhynia, they could seem tainted by these influences even for the eyes of officials from Warsaw. Thus, independent statehood ironically “led to the reinforcement of imperial borders” (72) in a cultural sense, as Poles socialized under different conditions suddenly found themselves in the same political space.Chapter 3 explores how the border with Soviet Ukraine solidified in both a physical and an abstract sense. Initially, a green border that smugglers, refugees, and peasants who could not otherwise cultivate their lands had no problem crossing, it took years to mark out and fortify the border line, which was then entrusted to the protection of a special unit. According to its mythology, carefully analyzed by Ciancia, this Borderland Protection Corps not only valiantly stopped the “Red menace” on the border and kept out Bolshevik infiltrators, but it also carried out patriotic work in educating the peasant population of the border zone. How successful it was is open to doubt: in the last free elections in 1928, Communist parties received a whopping 48 percent of the vote in Volhynia.Poles had watched with angst in the early 1920s as the waves of eastern refugees brought many Jews with them. Chapter 4 focuses on how the Jews of Volhynia were framed and dealt with under Piłsudski. The thinking of Sanacja officials did not fundamentally differ from their National Democratic opponents on this point. They also viewed Jews as a problem, a backward element clinging to the memory of Russian rule but not irredeemably alien to Polish culture. As a widespread stratagem to keep their sway on local politics in check, the administrative surface of towns expanded by annexing the surrounding villages, pushing the share of Jews in the urban population below fifty percent. Significantly, Polish administrators considered Ukrainian peasants as allies in this context. But, jealous of their local interests, the affected peasants resisted such administrative-demographic maneuvers as vocally as the urban Jews.Having looked at Jewish-majority towns in chapter 4, Ciancia turns to Sanacja policies toward rural areas in chapter 5. The regime hoped to gain the consent of the kresy population by demonstrating Polish civilizational superiority. To defuse controversy and avoid looking like arrogant colonizers, officials emphasized the progress that came from disseminating notions of hygiene, defeating illiteracy, or consolidating fragmented agricultural plots. Coercion still loomed large behind improvement programs, in the form of enforcing the use of outhouses or enlisting peasants to perform unpaid labor on land amelioration works. Moreover, the regime was eager to stem the tide of Ukrainian nationalist mobilization and to that end maintained an internal administrative border with the former Galicia.Chapter 6 concentrates on the top-down creation of a multicultural Volhynian regional identity and its promotion for Volhynian and wider Polish audiences. As embodied in tourist guidebooks or the publications and permanent exhibition of the Volhynian Museum of Łuck/Lutsk, this interwar region branding idealized Ukrainian and Polish peasant cultures and lamented over their passing. Through its focus on national diversity, it indirectly also celebrated the purported Polish disposition for tolerance. Predictably, it found it harder to press Jews into its image of peasant authenticity, although they fitted equally well into the narrative about Polish tolerance. Regionalist writers emphasized the architectural value of old synagogues, which harked back to the era of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Characteristically, however, they liked to extol the diminutive community of Karaite Jews for features that were seen as atypical for Jews.Chapter 7, finally, describes the right-wing shift after Piłsudski’s death, which nevertheless built on Sanacja’s technocratic worldview. In Ciancia’s felicitous expression (198), right-wing Polish discourse fixed Jewish identity once again as hopelessly alien and unfit for reform and unfixed the identity of Ukrainians as uncertain and malleable, which potentially made them responsive to assimilation. Demographers debated how far the peasantry had absorbed Ukrainian national consciousness to direct the efforts of policymakers to areas (like southern Volhynia) and segments of the population (like petty nobles) with apparently fluid identities. In 1937–38, the Borderline Protection Corps orchestrated a campaign to intimidate or cajole Ukrainian village communities into conversion—however, less than half a percent of Volhynian Orthodox yielded to pressure and converted to Catholicism. At the same time, demographic anxieties over comparatively high Ukrainian birthrates gave rise to new ideas about population management and internal colonization.The chapters of the book travel through an impressive range of research paradigms, with the themes of integrating the borderland and reframing identities cutting through them. The narrative mainly relies on contemporary press articles, memoirs, unpublished reports, and other archival material originating from people whom Ciancia calls “second-tier actors”—Polish journalists, border guard officers, mid-level bureaucrats, midwives, healthcare activists, schoolteachers, urban developers, academics etc., a large part of whom were not native to the province. Although this choice leaves the perspectives of ordinary Jewish town-dwellers, Ukrainian peasants, and indigenous Poles somewhat in the shadow (not to mention Jewish and Ukrainian activists), it produces an in-depth, intricate historical anthropology of how various groups of actors tried to manage uncertain spaces and identities as representatives of the young Polish state. Thanks to the wealth of analogies it can offer, the interest of Ciancia’s book goes beyond interwar Polish history and should be read by researchers of modern nation-state or imperial borderlands more widely.