Vol. 11, No. 2 (2026) of the Journal of Frontier Studies is devoted to the frontier as a space of circulation of people, goods, institutions, and symbolic forms, ranging from early modern trade routes and transport corridors to ethnic categorizations, educational regimes, and practices of travel. The unifying concern of the issue is the ways in which border zones generate new forms of connectivity, social governance, cultural interaction, and identification. The volume is structured around four thematic clusters: economic processes, the national through the frontier, education on the Russian frontier, and journeys on the frontier.

In its historical and economic dimension, the frontier emerges as a milieu of exchange, infrastructural growth, and political calculation. The articles on the Moscow Trading Corporation of English merchants and the Volga-Caspian transport corridor demonstrate how trading privileges, corporate forms, and routes of communication functioned as instruments of the Europeanization of Russian trade, the intensification of international ties, and industrial development. The section “The National Through the Frontier” shifts the emphasis to the production of difference. It addresses the everyday reproduction of nationalities in Dagestan, the typology of monumental objects in the North Caucasus as traces of cultural influence, the transformation of penal forms in Khorezm within the comparative framework of “East–Russia–West,” and the electronic and media frontier, where the figure of the “Russian trickster” operates as an ambivalent image of the Other in transnational popular culture.

A distinct focus of the issue is education as a frontier practice through which divergent norms and ways of life are negotiated. Using Kazan as a case study, one article examines private girls’ schools as spaces of ethnoconfessional interaction and alternative models of female education. Drawing on material from the Far North, Siberia, and the Far East, another explores the tension between compulsory general education and traditional modes of knowledge transmission in communities with mobile ways of life. In the Arctic case, educational policy is analysed in relation to industrial development, the involvement of extractive companies, the preservation of Indigenous cultures, and the overcoming of digital inequality. Across all these contexts, the frontier appears as a zone in which the mechanisms of adaptation, inclusion, and the redistribution of cultural resources become especially visible.

The section on journeys broadens the perspective of the issue by showing how the frontier is experienced and represented through movement, pilgrimage, and educational mobility. In M. F. Price’s travelogue, Siberian space is articulated through colonial and orientalist schemes of perception; in the notes of residents of Russian monasteries, the Holy Land appears as a distinctive religious space that is at once spiritually attractive and culturally alien; in the study of Belarusian academic emigration to Czechoslovakia, the frontier emerges as a transborder educational trajectory and a means of national self-preservation. Taken together, the issue presents the frontier as a multi-layered environment in which new social forms, modes of representing the Other, and regimes of inclusion and exclusion are produced at the intersection of empire, market, ethnicity, education, media, and migration. By virtue of its range of themes and approaches, the volume will be of particular interest to historians, anthropologists, cultural scholars, and researchers working on education, media, and transborder mobility.