Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Tim Winter, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the production, reclaiming and contestations over the place, role, and agency of “Eastern Europe” in the turbulent global geographies of knowledge production. The claim is that in the context-dependent hierarchy of knowledge claims about Afro-Eur-Asia, Eastern Europe remains a space invisible to both Western and non-Western sites of knowledge production. In the wake of the full-scale Russian aggression on Ukraine in February 2022, East European countries promoted a narrative of “frontline democracies” in the face of growing authoritarian encroachment from external actors such as Russia, China, and Turkey, but also in places such as the US, UK, and across Europe. Such moves for epistemic significance and political agency seem to have revived the fetishized geographic imaginary of Eastern Europe as the zone of conflict permanently fixed in-between multiple Wests and Easts, yet never truly belonging to any of them. The paper suggests that the East European geo-narratives of “frontline democracies” seek to unmap the region from such re-productions of peripherality. The space-producing logic of such marginalisation occurs constantly through flows, multiple institutional arrangements and practices as well as discourses at various interrelated scales, yet in very different contexts. Tracing the geo-narratives of “frontline democracies” is instructive for understanding how certain knowledge “travels” along the highways of the epistemic maps of Afro-Eur-Asia and becomes universally accepted or remains a partial knowledge with validity restricted to the backroads of certain places and circulating within specific subfields.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Emilian Kavalski is the inaugural NAWA Chair Professor of Complex Systems in the Center for International Studies and Development at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland) and the book series editor for Routledge’s Rethinking Asia and International Relations. His work explores the interconnections between the simultaneous decentering of international relations by post-Western perspectives and non-anthropocentric approaches.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this hybrid talk has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to ziqi@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.