Cooperation across contested spaces: rethinking borderlands as sites of resilience
Cooperation across contested spaces: rethinking borderlands as sites of resilience

Summary/Abstract: This article develops a theoretical reconceptualisation of European borderlands by positioning them as productive sites of adaptive resilience rather than structurally vulnerable peripheries. It argues that dominant securitisation frameworks, centred on threat construction and exceptionalism, insufficiently capture the relational, epistemic, and democratic capacities that emerge in borderland settings. Building on the concept of adaptive continuity, the article advances a five-pillar model of borderland resilience that explains how political cohesion, institutional endurance, economic adaptability, social solidarity, and psychological robustness together sustain governance under conditions of chronic uncertainty. Chosen empirical cases demonstrate how proximity to geopolitical volatility fosters anticipatory intelligence, civic agency, and cross‑scalar coordination that can surpass centralised state responses. These dynamics reveal forms of situated expertise that challenge centre‑periphery hierarchies and complicate technocratic interpretations of resilience. The article contends that recognising borderland agency requires a shift from security understood as control to security understood as cooperative adaptation, thereby reframing borderlands as laboratories of democratic resilience. Their practices illuminate how political communities learn, innovate, and maintain continuity amid the dynamics of permacrisis, offering conceptual and empirical insights into the evolving architecture of European security.

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