Description
This paper uses a relational ethnographic approach to assess the different (in)securities of a peripheral and marginalised Estonian community to explore lessons on human security. This approach aims at studying global politics by focusing on the local context and bringing the voices of those in peripheral areas to the fore. By focusing on the diverse lives of ordinary residents in Narva, the border town between Estonia and Russia, the paper amplifies the need to understand how insecurities are understood and experienced everyday by the local communities, who are all too often excluded from societal cohesion processes, to aid in providing the social and political tools to produce promotive societal integration. This leads to the research problem of how everyday acts of socio-cultural bordering (re)create insecurities, and threaten social cohesion and, by extension, national security. A critical relational approach facilitates focusing on the specific relations that matter to Narvans, gaining a more complete understanding of the forces that both constitute and contest the border, and produce the mutual dissociation that has established a national and social divide within Estonia.
Methodologically, this paper is taking a bottom-up perspective, through the vehicle of a relational ethnography, which produces a selection of narrative-vignettes of the borderland of Estonia. Firstly, the narrative-vignettes highlight the importance and potential of attending to culturally embedded knowledge on both a local and human level. Secondly, they raise essential questions about power relationships, security and social integration within Estonia society by highlighting what everyday acts of socio-cultural
bordering look like in actual practice.
