The Rebordering of Everyday Life: War, Mobility and Solidarity on the Ukrainian–Slovak Border

The article analyses the transformations of the Ukrainian–Slovak borderland under the conditions of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. Drawing on qualitative empirical research (24 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2023–2024) and ethnographic observations, it attempts to trace how the functional meaning of the border and its everyday perception by the residents of borderland communities are changing. The study centres on the concept of ‘borderscapes’, which makes it possible to interpret the border as a dynamic socio-spatial construct formed at the intersection of embodied experience, material infrastructure, institutions, practices and narratives. In wartime, the border becomes not only an instrument of security but also a resource of everyday resilience that reorganises routine interactions, forms of solidarity and moral boundaries in Ukrainian–Slovak borderland communities. The research shows how the narrativisation of the traumatic experience of war transforms the border from a space of cross-border economic interaction into a multi-layered security infrastructure, a resource of protection and a channel of selective mobility. The war activates processes of ‘affective bordering’ within which emotional reactions and feelings of threat and solidarity shape new representations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ – both in inter-national and intra-Ukrainian dimensions. The analysis identifies gender-asymmetrical mobility regimes, the delegitimisation of the informal borderland economy, and the growing role of borderland communities as agents of social resilience, solidarity and cross-border cooperation.