Hello! My name is Mary Shiraef, and I am a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Notre Dame. My research examines the unintended consequences of borders and national identity engineering policies. When the world shut down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was just about to conduct my fieldwork in Albania, where one of the world's longest border closures in the world was in effect between 1945 and 1990, earning communist Albania the nickname Europe's "North Korea."

To my surprise, countries all over the world began to introduce border closures in response to COVID-19 at unprecedented levels--despite their economic and humanitarian costs--seemingly with no end in sight. Even more surprising was that no organization was documenting these closures systematically.

In response, I coauthored an online piece in collaboration with Stanford University's Immigration Policy Lab--Will COVID-19 Harden the World's Borders?--and then formed the COVID Border Accountability Project (COBAP Team), a collective of emerging scholars who volunteered our time to create a database for scholars, journalists, and citizens of the world to have a record of the border closure policies introduced as a result of COVID-19. We updated the data throughout 2020-21--including the end dates of each policy.

I simultaneously pushed forward my project in Albania during the lockdowns of 2020 with historical research on the dynamics of the Greek minority leading up to communist Albania's sudden and sweeping border closure with Greece in 1945. Thereafter, I spent two years in Albania, documenting the effects of the border closure on identity transmission among the Greek minority in southern Albania. With a team of research assistants, I visited and documented more than 200 cemeteries and their civil registries in southern Albania.

My **nearly finished** dissertation tells the story of communist Albania's "identity engineering" of the Greek minority after its 1945 border closure and the long-term effects on local politics and for the generations that followed.

In line with COBAP's underlying goal and my broader research agenda, my dissertation aims to provide a historical and scientific resource for understanding the implications of national borders.

RESOURCES:

Want to use the latest version of the COBAP data? The Nature Portfolio's journal, Scientific Data, put our project through peer review and published our full guide for using the completely open-access data:

COVID Border Accountability Project, a hand-coded global database of border closures introduced during 2020

The observational data for social scientific research is kept on Harvard Dataverse here. For ALL our raw data over time, reference COBAP's Github here.

Want to see the results on whether COVID border closures worked? We answer that question in our second peer-reviewed publication: Did border closures slow SARS-CoV-2? This publication also provides the data in time-series format.

Just want to see and play with the COBAP data? Check out our website's interactive map or subscribe here for project updates.

Finally, I love coffee! If you support my work, consider fueling my effort with some virtual coffees below.

Thanks so much!