ABSTRACT
The establishment of the Turkish-Georgian border in 1921 divided many valleys, villages, and families between two countries. Later, the demarcation line turned into an impermeable border between the USSR and NATO member Turkey, which made cross-border communication impossible for decades. The opening of the border in 1988, rather than, as expected, reuniting families, only magnified the sense of difference and otherness. Despite the spatial and symbolic division between estranged relatives, however, the emerging cross-border interactions and active socioeconomic intermingling created new shared experiences and ways of relating to each other for the inhabitants of the borderland. The relationship between the ‘borderlanders’ entails assumptions of differences informed by people’s belonging to one side of the border or the other. Yet, they live in a shared borderland space, and thus their lives are intertwined through shared experiences and knowledge of navigating a specific physical and social landscape. Common experiences, trajectories, social interactions, and economic interdependences generate a particular sense of relatedness among the inhabitants of the Turkish-Georgian borderland. This study explores how borderland space both shapes and is shaped by social practices at the border, and how these practices, in turn, mark the borderland as a unified, lived-in space that transgresses the physical state border.
