The new Franco-German Jean Monnet Excellence Centre in Strasbourg will focus on resilience of borderlands as laboratories of European Integration. The COVID19-crisis has shown how fragile Borderlands are when re-bordering in Europe takes place.

The Centre will propose a set of activities that aim at fostering the role of EU borderlands as models for European Integration. It will federate a pluridisciplinary team of 8 Jean Monnet Chairs and 8 researchers from the University of Strasbourg and the University of Applied Sciences in Kehl, researchers from the Transfrontier Euro-Institute Network (TEIN), the Euro-institute in Kehl, the Mission opérationnelle transfrontalière (MOT) in Paris and the Jean Monnet Excellence Center in Victoria (UVIC).

The Centre will function both as a tool for and as an observatory of cross-border resilience in Europe. There are three fields of activities.

• In the field of education, the Centre will create a joint Master on Cross-Border Mobility of the University of Applied Sciences in Kehl and the University of Strasbourg, a Moodle platform on borders and European Integration and a further education program.
• In the field of research, there will be six seminars dealing with resilience of cross-border territories and their role as laboratories of European Integration, a joint European-Canadian doctoral seminar and a laboratory for an integrated Franco-German research Centre.
• Finally, for the civil society, there will be an annual “border walk” with the organization of an artistic expression of how the border is actually lived (reading, exhibition, concert) and an observatory-webinar on European cross-border resilience. The Centre will lead to the publication of a comparative book on cross-border resilience, a special issue on European Integration and Border Studies, a joint Franco-German Master, a set of teaching modules and a cross-border program for further education, three webinars on cross-border resilience and a Franco-German research Centre.