Section 1.1. Transgression of the Life-World in the Socio-Cultural Borderland

The section conceptualizes sociocultural borderlands as dynamic spaces where identity competition is enacted in everyday experience. Drawing on Husserl’s lifeworld, social reality is treated as an intersubjective horizon of meanings rather than a fixed inventory of objects. War, migration, and networked sociality make questions of boundaries and belonging methodologically urgent. The objective is to refine tools for analyzing lifeworld transgression in borderland conditions and to explain how multiple and hybrid identities arise among migrants, using the Ukrainian refugee experience as an indicative case. The study combines phenomenological interpretation with comparative conceptual analysis of border studies, boundary studies, and frontier studies. It differentiates territorial regimes, symbolic demarcations, and liminal zones, and synthesizes philosophical accounts of otherness, deterritorialization, and transgression into a unified framework. First, border is defined as an authoritative regime that regulates mobility, permission, and exclusion, while boundary designates symbolic markers of difference that organize cultural status and access to resources. Second, frontier is interpreted as a soft, shifting zone of uncertainty and mobility where social roles are rewritten and new forms of contact become possible. Third, encounters with the Other destabilize everyday norms and prompt acculturation pathways, including public inclusion, diaspora community participation, integration into the host community, differentiated inclusion, exclusion, and return oriented reintegration. These patterns illuminate how symbolic boundaries mediate security, rights, and everyday mutual recognition. Transgression is conceptualized as threshold movement that erodes prior certainties and generates new limits through repeated crossings. The borderland appears as a living “in between” space that can function as a laboratory for ethical responsibility, solidarity, and identity innovation. Future work should operationalize these categories in empirical studies of communicative competence, institutional support, and conflict intensity, and should examine how war driven mobility reshapes European symbolic boundaries, governance capacities, and resilience.