Beyond the nation and into the state: identity, belonging, and the ‘hyper‐border’
Journal: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
Year: 2016

The case of the disputed Southern Kuril Islands/Northern Territories is used to introduce the term ‘hyper‐border’ in order to examine the instrumental and pragmatic nature of identity. It seeks to capture how, on one of Russia's most isolated borders, the quotidian realities and challenges of life ‘beyond’ the state had profound implications for how discourses around state, nation, sovereignty and identity are conceived. During the 1990s these islands became a site neither fully within, nor with