Dematerialising Borders offers a pioneering investigation into how the 21st century’s proliferation of violent and exclusionary international borders can be reversed. The aim of the project is to bring social sciences, medical sciences, and humanities into conversation by creating a new paradigm for the study of border reopenings and crafting a methodology to show how this can inform empirical research.

In recent years the increased importance of borders in populist mobilisation and migration control has spawned a vast critical literature over many disciplines. In contrast, our practical knowledge about how these processes can actually be reversed is limited. This project addresses this urgent gap in our understanding by conceptualising a scattered and unconnected range of insights across various disciplines as examples of what is termed ‘border dematerialisation.’

A creative mixed-methods approach is developed to examine the remarkable but little-known example of the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Ferghana Valley border reopening from 2017 onwards. Fieldwork will be conducted in rural borderlands and capital cities. Textual and discourse analysis, border-village ethnography, and elite interviews with both national policymakers and local officials will be used to piece together the story of how, and to what effect, a previously tightly-sealed border was politically ‘desecuritised’ (ceased to be presented to the public as a pressing national security issue and existential threat) and practically reopened for trade and passage.

The project addresses ISRF goals by forging a new interdisciplinary paradigm to tackle the pressing global problem of the proliferation of violent borders. It seeks to reorganise existing knowledge through a novel conceptualisation of border dematerialisation thus charting the way for future research, and provides a specific new example of what this looks like drawn from the ‘Global South.’ It is a bold attempt to overcome disciplinary silos that does not fit comfortably within the remits of traditional funding bodies.