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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Kirkenes-Nikel
applications can be made
via
mail or on-line and there is no need to go to the visa center in person
for an interview or to receive the visa (Pettersen, 2013). The Norwegian side introduced similar on-
line services in its consulate in Murmansk and opened a visa center there. In the summer of 2012, a
temporary Norwegian consular office was opened in Zapolyarny to issue ID cards for the local
border residents. It functioned during several days and received more than 100 Russian applicants
(Nickel News, 2013). The Norwegian side also plans to open an honorary consulate in Nikel to
handle applications from the local residents.
As the Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre underlined on one occasion, Norway was one
of the first Schengen countries to undertake such an experiment on the liberalization of the visa
regime (Lebed, 2012). On the other occasion, he told his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov that he
expects the introduction of a visa-free regime with Russia in the foreseeable future (Pogoretskaya,
2013a).
Education:
Cooperation between twins in the sphere of education started from collaborative projects
between elementary and secondary schools as well as from various language courses: training and
retraining of school teachers of English [with the help of the University of Nordland (Bodø,
Norway) and Murmansk State Institute for Humanities] and the Norwegian language courses for the
Nikel residents. These projects proved to be efficient and are continued to date (Lebed, 2011).
In December 2012 an ambitious project to establish an international Master‘s program in Border
Studies (Bordology) has been launched by the University of Nordland and Murmansk State Institute
for Humanities. The main idea of the project is to train specialists in border management for the
Norwegian and Russian border regions. The group of 20 students were recruited from candidates
with bachelor degrees and composed of ten Russian (5 slots are reserved for students from Nikel
and Pechenga) and ten Norwegian representatives who are being trained in Nikel, Murmansk and
Kirkenes for 3.5 years. The program is a combination of class-room lectures and seminars with web-
based distant-learning technologies. The courses are taught in English by teachers from Norwegian
and Russian universities and practitioners from various governmental and municipal bodies. The
program‘s curriculum is built on the Bologna Process principles and should result in getting a MA
degree from the University of Nordland (Bulygin, 2012; Grimmer, 2013; Pogoretskaya, 2013b). For
the time-being it is difficult to say whether the project will be a success story or not, but the demand
for specialists in border management is very high in both twinning communities.
Cultural Strategies: Increasing Familiarity
The Sør-Varanger community and the Pechenga district have well-established and multifaceted
cultural cooperative ties with each other.
The core of twinning cultural activities is the
Barents Spektakel,
a festival which is held in Kirkenes on
an annual basis from 2004. As the organizers describe it, ―[t]he festival is a cultural-political cocktail
with contemporary art, performances, literature, theatre, film, seminars and concerts as ingredients,
spiced with the current issues related to the Barents Region and the High North in general‖
(Barentsspektakel website). The main aim of the festival is to promote cultural contacts between