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From the Editors

Volume 11 of the Eurasia Border Review grows out of the Summer Symposium held on July 2-3, 2020 at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center. Entitled “Northeast Asia: Pitfalls and Prospects, Past and Present”, the conference took place under the aegis of the NIHU Area Studies Project for Northeast Asia (NoA-SRC), and as with previous iterations was originally planned to take place on site at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. As may be imagined, COVID-19 prevented our overseas guests from travelling to Japan and also limited mobility within the country, so the entire event was rapidly transferred online. While the time difference provided some headaches, participants from Korea, Russia, New Zealand, Poland, the UK, the US, and so forth ensured a tremendously successful, if socially-distanced, event.

This issue provides a record of one of the sessions from the symposium, a Special Lecture on “Rebordering in the EU under Covid-19: Lessons for Northeast Asia?” given by Jarosław Jańczak of Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland. COVID-19 is a pandemic that has overwhelmed regional as well as national borders, but it has manifested itself differently in different regions, with the responses of various national governments heavily marked by these regional differences. This first volume in our new Series of EBR provides a clear contribution to the work we are conducting under the NIHU Area Studies Project here at the SRC.

October 2020

                  　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　On behalf of the Editors

Akihiro Iwashita & Edward Boyle