Dr Emilian Kavalski1
1Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland
Biography:
Emilian Kavalski is the NAWA Chair Professor at the Complex Systems Lab, 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. Emilian is the author of four books, one of which is: The Guanxi of Relational International Theory (Routledge 2018) and he is the editor of twelve volumes, including, World Politics at the Edge of Chaos (State University of New York Press, 2016).
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, strategies for addressing the turbulent dynamics of world affairs. This ‘Ukraine moment’ does not represent a novel development but has rather compels 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 different world orders.