While COVID-19 tests have now become so commonplace that they are something we can add to a shopping list, the world continues to face a common global challenge within the inner workings of the multinational cooperation system: a global health crisis still requires global health cooperation. At the same time, borders in many places have gone from being open to becoming strictly controlled, and previous liberal market values have been set aside in favour of protectionism, with the result of more internal and closed nation states.

In our Northern communities, regional cooperation with our neighbours in Russia comes under strain when international vaccine policies only add to existing challenges related to freedom of expression, the economy and military rearmament on both sides of the border. While some of us dream of reopening tourist shops, traveling, shopping and living according to “the old normal” again, others predict lasting changes and a less open, less prosperous world with increasingly reduced freedom.

Mobility in spite of boundaries is what gives our border areas their character, and their feeling of centrality. What are the consequences if the borders, in practice, remain closed, and turn our border areas into peripheries once again? What effect have the pandemic and international vaccine politics had for the North and the relationship across the Norwegian-Russian Border?

To end the debate, the duet Struny Struny take the stage in Kirkenes. This new project by Ekaterina Efremova (guitar and vocals) and Irina Volokoslavskaya (kantele)performs its own songs based on 20th-century poems, creating a unique blend of guitar and kantele.