ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the public debate about Russia–Estonia and Russia–Finland relationships reflected in Nezavisimaia Gazeta between 1992 and 2017. Analysing articles concerned with Estonia and Finland, it investigates changes in the relationships between Russia and Estonia and Russia and Finland, and seeks to reconstruct borderscapes as fields created by manifestations of differences between Russia and these two neighbouring countries. While state borders are used here as the borderscape’s main signifier, it also includes other meaningful divergences existing on more than a symbolic and conceptual level between the countries and reflected in the newspaper discourse. The concept of orders of justification, elaborated by French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Loran Thévenot, is used as the study’s conceptual analytical framework to identify the compositions of orders in the given borderscape and trace their transformation over time. The two emerging borderscapes of Russia–Estonia and Russia–Finland as two cases of post-Soviet borders, ‘old’ and ‘new’, are then compared.
