Speaker
Description
Customs and geopolitics condition one another and are produced
on a transnational, national, and local scale. The Russian
war in Ukraine gives this interdependency a human face in the
form of thousands of lorry drivers waiting to be cleared at external
EU borders. This article explores the reasons and the inherent
power structure behind movement and stasis at the border triangle
between Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania. Flanking the
European Union, this border is a historically contested and infrastructurally
dense nodal point where corruption is rife. Analysing
EU policy discourse on border management, and combining
semi-structured interviews with customs officials, conversations
with lorry drivers, and border and office-space ethnography, this
article brings together different narratives of Moldova’s integration
into the EU customs space. All these perspectives articulate
cross-border bureaucracy through a geopolitical lens. Thus, this
article ethnographically debunks the techno-bureaucratic discourse
of customs regulation that emphasises efficiency, rationality,
and transparency by shedding light on the everyday
dimension of customs and geopolitics as a lived practice.
Biography
Claudia Eggart is a social anthropologist with a Ph.D from the University of Manchester. Her recently defended dissertation studied “Lived Geopolitics. Re-scaling Market Infrastructures from Soviet Collapse to Backlash Imperialism”. From 2021-2024 she also worked as a researcher at Centre for East European and International Studies (ZoiS), as part of the project LimSpaces – Living with Uncertainty. Strategies of Adaptation and Horizons of Expectations in Ukraine and Moldova. At ZOiS, her research focuses on customs and border logistics at the intersection of three Danube ports in Ukraine, Moldova and Romania. In particular, she investigates how the geopolitical tensions in the region affect the lived experiences of logistics workers. Her work was published in journals like Euro-Asian Studies Journal, Third World Quarterly, and Geopolitics.
