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beyond the perceived “center.” Representing both the state and their own institutional and personal
interests within (and even against) emerging state structures, these men and women created their own

sense of who should be included and excluded at a local level. Rather than taking “exclusion” and

“inclusion” as unproblematic terms that defined two separate ideological spheres, we need to trace

how the precise contours of “the nation” were created and shaped closer to the ground.

As historians have long shown, borderlands offer particularly rich places in which to explore

the messy construction of “the nation,” thus potentially avoiding black-and-white narratives about

inclusion or exclusion. I say “potentially” because some scholars continue to depict borderlands as

spaces of either synergy and creative cultural exchange or as “shatter zones,” “zones of violence,”

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“rimlands,” or “bloodlands.” In fact, these two ideas often fit within a certain chronological
framework—borderlands exist as places of vibrant and inclusive exchange until the modern state

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intervenes to flatten local cultures, usually with some degree of violence. In the case of interwar

Volhynia, this narrative is not necessarily wrong. Indeed, as the last two chapters of this book will

show, changes in the province over the course of the 1930s did reflect a broader shift away from a

faith in Piłsudski’s vision of a more explicitly inclusionary nationalism and toward its exclusionary

twin. But the sources created by the second-tier actors also suggest the messy nature of these

31 On local adaptations of Polish nationalism in Habsburg Galicia, see Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the
Village: The Genesis of Peasant Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848-1914 (Ithaca, 2001); Peter Sahlins, Boundaries:
The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, 1989).
32 The idea of borderlands as sites of hybridity has often been promoted by scholars working on the U.S.-Mexico
borderlands. See, for instance, Gloria E. Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco,
1987). Much of the literature on modern eastern Europe has focused on the idea of borderlands as sites of violent
interactions. On the idea of “shatter zones,” see Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz (eds.), Shatterzone of Empires.
Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington, 2013); see
also Mark Biondich, “Eastern Borderlands and Prospective Shatter Zones: Identity and Conflict in East Central and
Southeastern Europe on the Eve of the First World War” in Legacies of Violence: Eastern Europe’s First World
War, edited by Jochen Bohler, Wlodzimierz Borodziej, and Joachim von Puttkamer (Munich, 2014), 25-50. On
“rimlands,” see Mark Levene, The Crisis of Genocide: Volume One: Devsatation: The European Rimlands, 1912-
1938 (Oxford, 2013). On “bloodlands,” see Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New
York, 2010).
33 Kate Brown’s study of the kresy from the Soviet perspective focuses on the modernizing state’s attempts to
impose “order” on diversity. Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland
(Cambridge, MA, 2004).

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