ABSTRACT
This chapter zooms in on the b/ordering site of Ukraine and provides detailed evidence for the empirical argument that EU field diplomats’ boundary work forms a nexus of practices that composes the normative background of the EU community. Boundary work is therefore identified as the constitutive rule that orders the infinite ways of actualising the EU community in the local diplomatic ‘community of practice’ in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv. By way of a fourfold distinction of boundary practices – internal boundary-spanning and boundary-drawing as well as external boundary-spanning and boundary-drawing – I present my findings as reconstructed from interviews conducted with EU diplomats in Kyiv in 2012 and 2014. The interviews reveal that boundary work is anything but a harmonious and coherent undertaking; in fact, it is a mélange of sometimes contradictory practices in which multiple layers of belonging are exposed. Boundary work is established as a constant play on boundaries in which the practices of linking and demarcation compensate one another, thus never losing the overall balance. Ultimately, it is not substantial agreement among the diplomatic ‘community of practice’ in Kyiv that creates senses of like-mindedness but the joint engagement in boundary work.
