More than 2600 participants from more than 80 countries worldwide attended the 35^th International Geographical Congress (IGC) between 24 and 30 August in Dublin, Ireland. Bianca Mitrică, a member of CESCI’s Board and Gyula Ocskay, secretary general moderated two panels on peripheries, borders and regional development, involving 7 scholars representing 7 different countries.

The 35^th IGC was designed to celebrate the world of difference. Notwithstanding the site visits around Dublin, the business meetings, the ceremonial events and the general assembly meetings of several international geographical organisations, the participants had the opportunity to attend more than 520 thematic panels representing the colourful differences the congress aimed at celebrating, from spatially focused sessions (like those addressing coastal, mountainous, peripheral areas, etc.) to thematic ones (including urban, agricultural, geopolitical, cultural, ethnic, gender, climate, etc. topics) and methodological ones (like education of geography, geoinformatics, participatory planning, etc.).

Two of these panels were organised and moderated by Ms Bianca Mitrică, head of department of the Romanian Academy of Sciences and a member of CESCI’s Board and Mr Gyula Ocskay, our secretary general. The joint title of the two panels was: ‘Local and regional development: territorial development, peripheral areas and cross-border cooperation’. The presentations targeted colourful topics.

Luc Ampleman from the Jagiellonian University of Kraków (PL), analysed the factors of transport diplomacy in three cross-border contexts, namely Scotland, Norway and Poland. He pointed out the significance of involving the stakeholders in the design of transport development projects from both sides of the border. Stefan Hippe presented the results of the project called COBO through which the scholars of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (DE) investigated the differences between the cross-border travelling times by car and by train around Germany. They concluded that trains are faster within the same country while the car is a more advantageous means of transport in a cross-border context.

Bianca Mitrică presented the phenomena and the impacts of a large migration wave of Ukrainian refugees in Romania. From the beginning of the war, Romania received more than 5 million refugees across the Ukrainian and nearly 1.8 million across the Moldavian border whose integration poses remarkable challenges to the national public service system.

Based on the available descriptions of projects, Ana Belén López Tárraga, PhD student of the University of Salamanca (ES) compared the sustainable food policies applied along the Spanish-Portuguese and the Finnish-Swedish borders. Inês Gusman Barbosa representing the University of Santiago de Compostela but living in Braga (PT) presented examples of cross-border cooperation initiatives and services going beyond the national frames and generating new territorial imageries.

Péter Reményi from the University of Pécs (HU) explained the past and present of the Hungarian and Croatian Baranya-Baranja microregion which performs among the worst regions in the EU. Yumei Liu, an expert at the School of Geography Science and Geomatics Engineering at the Suzhou University of Science and Technology (CHN) treated the special development paths and opportunities of the so-called ‘atypical villages’ in China.

During the closing ceremony, 12 scholars were awarded with different International Geographic Union awards. 5 of them came from China which clearly indicates the emerging new centres of research even in geography.