Resilience in the Finnish-Russian Border Region and Russia’s War against Ukraine: From the Perspective of Locally Engaged People

Abstract

The article deals with people’s resilience in the Finnish-Russian border region. The authors first show how inhabitants of the EU’s longest external border slowly acquired cross-border contacts and co-operation after a long period of war between 1939 and 1945. In the later parts, using a case study, they describe how the Russian war against Ukraine has drastically changed the life of the inhabitants of the Finnish-Russian border region. Nevertheless, a special group of inhabitants of this region practice everyday resilience in many ways: they try to live and maintain their relations as they did before the war.