Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Focusing on cross-border care work and care entrepreneurship in the Czech borderlands, this paper shows how peripheral positions enable strategic navigation of transnational inequalities through geographic arbitrage, complicating centre–periphery understandings of East Central Europe.

Paper long abstract

Centre–periphery frameworks have long conceptualized East Central Europe as structurally dependent, marginalized, and shaped by extraction toward Western European centres. This paper engages critically with these approaches by examining how peripheral positions are not only constraints but also conditions for strategic action within transnational care economies. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Czech borderlands, it focuses on care workers commuting between the Czech Republic and Germany and on care entrepreneurs who establish transnational institutional care arrangements for German-speaking clients.

Care workers engage in geographic arbitrage by living in the Czech Republic while working in Germany, navigating wage differentials, labour regimes, and costs of social reproduction across borders. Care entrepreneurs similarly mobilize centre–periphery asymmetries by situating care provision in the borderlands, balancing regulatory, linguistic, historical, and economic inequalities between Germany and the Czech Republic. These practices depend on the region’s peripheral positioning within European political and economic hierarchies, yet they actively reproduce and recalibrate these hierarchies in everyday organizational practices.

Rather than challenging centre–periphery relations by recentring the borderlands, the paper conceptualizes peripherality as a relational and productive condition. It shows how peripheral regions function as strategic interfaces where transnational inequalities are translated into care arrangements, thereby complicating static understandings of periphery as merely exploited or neglected within European integration.