From the Editors
With this issue, Eurasia Border Review has reached ten years of publication. While taking thisopportunity to celebrate our tenth anniversary, the editorial team also wishes to announce that from thisissue onwards, the editorial board and management will be reorganized, and the journal will move froman annual / semi-annual publication to one that will serve primarily as an outlet for the publication of
special issues.
The key aims behind the launching of Eurasia Border Review ten years ago were threefold: toshare expertise on the region with a wider border studies community; to raise the quality and profile ofyoung researchers working on Asia and Eurasia’s borders; and to collaborate with not only academics
but also practitioners. We celebrate the success of the journal in meeting these aims, which is clear fromthe way the discipline of border studies has rapidly developed in the region, producing a growing bodyof original research. We take pride in the fact that Eurasia Border Review has made a tremendous
contribution to the development of a global border studies community. Across our issues, we have seencontributions reach beyond Eurasia, ranging from Oceania and South America to the Arctic and thePacific Islands. Eurasia Border Review has also worked to further the development of theory withinborder studies, and the regional growth of the Association for Borderlands Studies – following thesuccess of the BRIT XII conference in Japan and Korea – would hardly have been possible without theoutputs and community of scholars that has emerged around Eurasia Border Review.
Over these ten years, Eurasia Border Review has published fourteen issues (including specialissues), and 92 full articles. These are from a rich variety of disciplines, including history, geography,literature, linguistics, sociology, international relations, politics, and economics. Relating the meaningand significance of border studies research across disciplines has been one of the notable achievementsof the journal.
Despite these successes, the time has come to revise the format of Eurasia Border Review inthe face of changes that have swept across the academic landscape over the last decade. Today, it hasbecome essential for young researchers to publish in journals with an impact factor, upon which theiremployment and advancement largely depends. However, it is not easy for the annual publication of asingle research institute to gain such a status. Publishing four times a year is essential, and in the mostsuccessful cases such journals are supported by large academic associations. Today, the Association for
Borderlands Studies, which began life on the U.S.-Mexico border, is rapidly expanding to become justsuch a global association. The Association’s journal, the Journal of Borderlands Studies, has developed
into a highly respected outlet, one that is widely cited in the field and beyond. Given this, and with theEurasia Border Review editorial team having achieved their original objectives, we have decided that
our mission should be to support the development of the Journal of Borderland Studies, and further
strengthen its presence in our region. With a truly global border studies community, the priority must
now shift towards strengthening and deepening interaction and engagement within this community.
However, this is not the end of the line for Eurasia Border Review. In future, the journal will
focus on publishing special issues, where scholars and practitioners will find a high quality forum for
DOI: 10.14943/ebr.10.1.1

1Eurasia Border Review

the outputs of research projects and collaborations across the field of border studies. Eurasia Border
Review begins this new era with a call for plans and proposals for special issues from interested
researchers. Eurasia Border Review is not solely a journal for young scholars, nor is it only for theEurasian scholarly community. We are open to border studies from throughout the world, and lookforward to working with you all in the future.
We would like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to our readers, as well as allthose who submitted articles to the journal, the dedicated team of reviewers from around the world, themembers of the editorial board at Hokkaido University, and the distinguished researchers who madeup our international advisory board. Without your dedication and support, the achievements of theprevious decade would not have been possible. In this issue, in addition to our regular articles, wepresent a collection of research resulting from an ongoing National Institute for the Humanities (NIHU)
Area Studies Project on Northeast Asia, directed by the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center of Hokkaido
University, to which we are grateful. We would also like to take a moment to offer thanks to Hokkaido
University for the editorial, publishing and financial support that has been provided to Eurasia Border
Review and its team over the years, and to particularly note the following research projects: Hokkaido
University Global COE Program “Reshaping Japan’s Border Studies (2009–2013)” and Kyushu
University’s Progress 100 program “Border Studies and Northeast Asia (2016–2019).”
At the start of a new decade, we wish all our readers success with their work, research andinterests in border studies. In anticipation of this being the opening of a new chapter in the history of
the journal, and thus a beginning rather than an end, we humbly present you with this, our last regularissue of Eurasia Border Review.
24 December 2019

On behalf of the Editors
Professor Akihiro Iwashita
Dr. Paul Richardson
Dr. Edward Boyle2