“…contemporary performances of border enforcement and security cannot be understood as distinct from the process of neoliberalization.”

So argues University of Oulu geographer Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola in her forthcoming Antipode paper ‘Neoliberalizing Border Management in Finland and Schengen‘. Eeva-Kaisa offers a critical examination of the development of border management in Finland and the Schengen Area, focusing on the Finnish Border Guard service. Border management in Finland provides an interesting case, she contends, not only because Finland is responsible for controlling the Schengen/EU-Russian border but also because, since Finnish state reforms in the early 1990s, neoliberal rationales have increasingly provided the guidelines for how to calculate and optimize border security. Her paper emphasizes that the rationales of border management should be made transparent and opened for public debate, analysing some key tenets of neoliberalized border governance – internationalization, competitiveness, risk prevention, and the functioning of society.