During the past decade, Ukraine’s border with the EU has gained new strategic importance as the country’s 'gateway to Europe' and frontier of Europeanisation. With the full-scale Russian invasion, it has turned into a life-saving corridor and a site of solidarity for millions of Ukrainian citizens. Due to the geographical proximity to the EU and NATO, Ukraine’s western border regions enjoy relative security; they have become a 'safe haven' for internally displaced persons (IDPs) and relocated businesses from the east and south. At the same time, these regions are the first to experience problems in Ukraine’s relations with its EU neighbours, such as memory wars with Poland or tensions over the rights of the ethnic Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia. Moreover, in the context of the Russian aggression, Ukraine’s western border, historically a product of great power deals and now an external NATO border, is also a site of geopolitical contestation. According to the Kremlin’s rhetoric, eastern Galicia, Transcarpathia and northern Bukovina (along with Volhynia and southern Bessarabia) are 'Stalin’s gifts to Ukraine'. Creating alternative narratives and regional identities is a challenge for the local Ukrainian elites, who are often caught in the conflicting priorities of Kyiv on the one hand, and the EU neighbours, on the other. Residents of the western border regions live through and experience these geopolitical contestations from below, through everyday practices of crossing the EU border.

This project aims to study processes of Europeanisation from below and localised geopolitical conflicts in three regions of Ukraine (Lviv, Transcarpathia and Chernivtsi) bordering with Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania. It builds on three theoretical pillars: 1) the concept of Europeanisation applied beyond the borders of the EU and dealing especially with the societal aspects of this process; 2) a 'bottom-up' approach to geopolitics understood not as the prerogative of states but involving local communities and ordinary citizens; and 3) the notion of the border as multiscalar, historically multi-layered and co-constructed by local actors through multiple cross-border ties and everyday practices. The project employs a multi-dimensional model of analysis addressing discursive representations of borders and geopolitical imaginaries as well as everyday practices of border crossing. 

• How are the Russian invasion and EU integration changing the role and functions of Ukraine’s western border and how are these changes affecting local communities in the border regions? 
• How do local elites and civil society in western Ukraine perceive and respond to the dominant geopolitical narratives addressing their regions? What alternative geopolitical visions, projects and identity constructs emerge from below?
• How is Ukraine’s EU integration seen and experienced on the local level? 
• How is the growing Euroscepticism within the EU perceived in the three regions of Ukraine addressed in the project?

• Qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis of selected geopolitical texts
• Interviews with representatives of local elites (public administration, NGOs, academia and cultural milieu)
• Focus groups and individual interviews with local residents who are frequent border crossers