English

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Schengen Agreement, the conference '40 Years of Schengen: People, Borders, Politics”, jointly organised by EMN Luxembourg and the UniGR-Center for Border Studies, of-fered a timely opportunity to celebrate European integration and critically analyse the evolving realities of border governance. Focusing on the free movement of people in border regions, particularly in the SaarLorLux area, the conference examined the socio-economic interdependencies, legal and political challenges that have arisen from the reintroduction of internal border controls. Panels and roundtable reflected on the shifting dynamics at the internal and external margins of the Schengen area, where migration, security discourse and geopolitical crises are reconfigured the Schengen spirit. Participants called for a renewed commitment to the core values of solidarity, trust, and shared sovereignty, emphasising that the future of Schengen requires political will and citizen engagement. The conference reaffirmed Schengen as a lived reality and a symbol of European freedom, as well as a strategic asset in times of uncertainty.

Schengen countries are increasingly relying on the Schengen Borders Code to make internal borders less permeable. This Working Paper focuses on the ongoing reintroduction of temporary internal border controls within the EU between 2015 and 2024, as well as the justifications provided by Schengen countries for these measures. The analysis identifies four phases, reflecting a gradual displacement of the Schengen spirit—established 40 years ago—by a prevailing border spirit. While open borders and free movement remain guiding principles of the European Union, national border regimes are gaining ground and are continuously being adapted to fluctuating threat perceptions. Migration, terrorism, public health, and hybrid threats serve as discursive resources to legitimize a Schengen reality that can no longer be regarded as exceptional, but rather as part of a normalized, security-oriented European order. This trajectory is characterized by a re-nationalization of border policy within the EU, an ever-expanding rhetoric of crisis, political instrumentalization, and an ambivalent mode of EU border governance.

Since the mid-2010s at the latest, there has been discussion of the border as a complex phenomenon, aimed at a more comprehensive and differentiated understanding of b/orderings. However, there seems to be an imprecise use of the term ‘complexity’ in the academic debate, and sometimes, still, an everyday understanding of complexity prevails. To sharpen the debate around a border’s complexity, in this comment, in a first step, I show what border scholars currently consider complex and question which analytical and conceptual developments in the wake of the bordering turn have encouraged the increasing talk of complex borders. In the second step, I suggest how border research can be inspired by complexity theories, in focusing on performative interrelations and their emergent dis/orders that become spatially and socially effective.

San Diego’s central neighborhoods are in the midst of a municipally and privately led redevelopment phase, which is gradually progressing from one neighborhood to the other and slowly transforming lower-income communities into ‘trendy’ places for affluent populations. This is particularly the case in the neighborhood of North Park, which has been redeveloped in the last decades and has recently begun to expand eastward across two inner-city highways into the large Hispanic and Asian American community of Mid-City. Particularly along the large commercial streets that link the two communities, previously produced and habituated differences are currently re-negotiated – socially and functionally but also economically, symbolically, and architecturally –, which provokes the emergence of a (temporal) hybrid in-between zone that is simultaneously part of the one and the other neighborhood. These changes are tied to municipal and private redevelopment efforts and are of significant everyday relevance for the residents of North Park and Mid-City alike. However, these processes have not yet undergone in-depth analysis. Our paper addresses this gap by developing a theoretical framework of multi-dimensional b/ordering processes, which takes account of the multi-faceted complexity of this transitional and temporal borderland. On the basis of this framework, empirical results from a mixed-method research study (qualitative interviews and participatory observations among others), conducted between 2019 and 2022, will be used to trace how San Diego’s progressing redevelopment trend furthers the multi-dimensional shift, perforation, and re-negotiation of boundaries and thus the emergence of a hybrid urban borderland between North Park and Mid-City.