Open lecture: "From a Buffer Zone to a Frontline Region? Unmapping Eastern Europe in a Multi-Order World"

Emilian Kavalski is the NAWA Chair Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland) and the book series editor for Routledge’s “Rethinking Asia and International Relations” series. His work explores the interconnections between the simultaneous decentring of International Relations by post-Western perspectives and non-anthropocentric approaches.

Open lecture title: "From a Buffer Zone to a Frontline Region? Unmapping Eastern Europe in a Multi-Order World".

Abstract: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has affected the status of Eastern Europe in global life. From a backward ‘buffer zone’ in both European and global affairs, it has emerged at the forefront of ideas, initiatives, and strategies for addressing the turbulent dynamics of world affairs. This ‘Ukraine moment’ does not represent a novel development, but has compelled a confrontation with the complex realities of East European unmapping. Unmapping refers to a set of insurgent dispositions which seek to challenge the spatio-ontological cartographies of epistemic provincialization, geopolitical peripheralization, and geocultural passivity, in which Eastern Europe appears to have been consigned. It is in their encounter with China during the second decade of the twenty-first century that East European actors began to unmap from the geopolitical semiotics of their stigmatization by actively navigating the complexity of a multi-order world. As such East European actors developed two distinct unmapping modalities – that of ‘frontline democracies’ and ‘illiberal democracies’. Both indicate that Eastern Europe is becoming a ‘frontline region’. The experience of East European unmapping demonstrates that while they are located at the interstices of several world orders, frontline regions are anything but the passive recipients of external agency; instead, they are spaces of debordering transformation where regional actors engage in the active selection, priming, and translation of the rules, norms, and practices of the different world orders.

Event is moderated by Dr Benjamin Klasche.