Border spotlight: Tarifa forum ties Strait pressures to Arctic “Intelligence” debate

Border spotlight: Tarifa forum ties Strait pressures to Arctic “Intelligence” debate | Photo: Daniel Balea

An international gathering in Tarifa held from Jan. 23 to 26 convened academics and civil-society actors to explore how Europe’s borders are changing, and why their impacts extend beyond familiar narratives and policy templates, amid environmental and digital disruption.

Under the title Borders in Motion, the programme maintained that border regions have become “pressure points” where political shifts, security decisions, migration flows and competing storylines intersect. In this context, the Campo de Gibraltar, with La Línea and the nearby Gibraltar frontier as reference points, was presented as a case study in which the debate over Schengen free movement and security remains close to the surface.

The event was hosted at The White House Tarifa, a venue that regularly holds gatherings connected to the Sustainable Development Goals and is also home to Global Society News (GSN). The programme described Tarifa as mainland Europe’s southernmost point, nearer to Tangier than to the next Spanish city, positioned at the junction where Europe and Africa meet and where the Mediterranean merges with the Atlantic. That closeness, where a border can be seen with the naked eye across the Strait, reinforced the meeting’s central idea: few places make the boundary feel so immediate and physical, with two continents appearing to face each other at close range.

Sessions blended in-person discussion with online contributions, ranging from “macro” questions of geopolitics and power competition to more local issues of regional development, cooperation and daily life at the edge of political space. The programme set Tarifa alongside two northern case studies, Finland’s Kainuu region and Kirkenes in northeastern Norway, to examine shared dynamics, including polarised narratives, security-driven pressures and the tendency for conflicts to sharpen in borderlands.

Within this setting, attention also turned to locally grounded civic work. Strait Up, a non-profit association registered in Spain, describes itself as a bridge between young people and civil-society organisations, linking them with resources and opportunities, and offering expertise in international project design, mediation and organisational capacity-building. Based in the Strait of Gibraltar, its approach treats borders not only as state boundaries, but also as divides between cultures, languages and communication styles. Its stated goals include strengthening youth participation, encouraging cultural cooperation, stimulating debate on the European project and EU–southern neighbourhood relations, promoting healthy lifestyles and advancing gender equality.

The agenda also connected Europe’s southern rim with the Arctic through the Calotte Academy, described as a “school of dialogue” whose travelling format, mobility, open discussion after each presentation and participatory methods were cited as a model that could be adapted to other border contexts. Its 2026 edition has issued a call focused on the theme “Intelligence”, arguing that the concept has re-entered the centre of public debate with the rise of artificial intelligence and the renewed visibility of military intelligence in a tense geopolitical environment. The call also frames today’s overlapping crises as crises of information, decision-making and knowledge production, pointing to frictions between epistemologies, from Indigenous knowledge to algorithmic prediction, and focusing on disinformation and “narrative battles”.

Calotte Academy 2026 is scheduled for June 8–14, with an itinerary across Sápmi in northern Finland, Norway and Sweden. The application deadline is March 31, 2026, and requires a 250–350 word abstract, a short bio/CV including academic status, and a brief publications list, submitted online via the academy’s official website, where additional requirements, contacts and updates are posted.

Overall, the Tarifa meeting reinforced a core message: borders are no longer only lines on maps. They also concern how perceptions are formed, which institutions and communities carry the consequences, and how methods, dialogue, cross-regional comparison and cooperation can offer something more durable than automatic answers in an age of uncertainty.