The South Caucasus region is among the most vulnerable in the world to the effects of climate change. Across the region, the European Union (EU) has initiated programmes and projects aimed at boosting climate resilience by increasing adaptation to climate change and mitigation of its consequences. Drawing on post-development thinking, the transformative turn in sustainability studies and climate justice scholarship, this paper critically deconstructs the EU’s approach to climate resilience in the South Caucasus. Through a critical discourse analysis of EU policy documents and EU-funded initiatives, the paper finds that, by promoting solutions that shift responsibility onto local communities, EU resilience-building depoliticizes climate change adaptation by disregarding the multi-scalar power relations and constraints that local vulnerable communities in the South Caucasus face in grappling with climate change. It argues that the EU’s neo-liberal approach to climate adaptation as a set of techno-economic measures facilitates the creation of resilient subjects who accommodate to the status quo rather than imagining an alternative. By engaging with alternative vocabularies and struggles for environmental, social and climate justice emerging from the region, the paper calls for a more transformational approach to climate adaptation and tackling the climate crisis, which requires systemic changes that address structural inequalities and destabilize power systems that produce climate injustices.

The South Caucasus, comprising Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, holds significant strategic importance as a crossroads in the Eurasian continent. China turned its attention to the South Caucasus with the initiation of the Belt and Road Initiative by the Chinese government in 2013. Driven by economic, political, and security considerations, Chinese observers have developed a keen interest in the region. The recent transformative shifts in South Caucasus, particularly in terms of security and interstate relations following the Nagorno-Karabakh war, have emerged as a focal point in Eurasian geopolitics. This development has become a prominent research area in China. Meanwhile, within the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) framework, the EU has implemented various initiatives to cultivate positive relations with these countries, aiming to safeguard EU interests and maintain regional stability. China closely observes the EU's policies, finding them a valuable reference for its own engagement in the region. Chinese experts employ a multi-dimensional perspective to study the ENP in the South Caucasus. This paper seeks to examine the research findings of Chinese scholars on the ENP and the Eastern Partnership (EaP) while analyzing their perspectives in comparison to those of European ones.

In the wake of massive outmigration after Romania’s integration into EU structures, the need for labor force has led to a growing purposeful recruitment of (South) Asian workers. These migrants are racialized and exploited in ways that both cement the self-ascribed whiteness of Romanians, understood as (potentially) belonging to Europe and to the core of the capitalist-liberal system, and shed light on the anxieties of this aspirational whiteness. Within the contexts of debates about Romania’s delayed entry into Schengen, concerns have appeared around migrants using their legal entry into Romania to further (and illegally) migrate West. Furthermore, Romanian business owners see their investments in importing labor power as wasted when they cannot maintain their new employees, cementing Romania’s status as a semiperipheral source of labor and resources for the core. Efforts to stop Romania from becoming a transition country have led to the doubling down on elements of violence under racial capitalism: border control and policing, and legislation restricting the freedom of foreign laborers. As it has historically depended on the unfreedom and securitization of the Roma, white Eastern Europeans’ free mobility now also depends on the unfreedom and securitization of non-European migrants. Analyzing how semiperipheral societies enact their accession to the core can help us understand Eastern Europe not as the border of global whiteness, but as one of the settings where identification into whiteness is made and remade as a claim and an entitlement to resources and power, to mobility, to the bodies and labor of racialized others.

How can we comprehend and make sense of the epistemic space and ‘grey zone’ between the traditional understandings of the ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ through relational approaches? Various concepts have emerged in the last years to frame post-soviet lived experiences – Eurasia, Global East, Central- and Eastern Europe, Transperipheral–, but so far none of them seem to be widely accepted. Why is it so particularly difficult/challenging to address this epistemic 'grey space'? How can we explore and understand the spaces opened by the sudden rupture caused by the fall of the Soviet world? This paper will address these questions in two steps. On the one hand, it explores how relational approaches can contribute to the post-imperial understanding of the former “Second World” prompted by questions about the possible links between the (post)socialist, (post)communist and the (post)colonial. On the other hand, through relational approaches, it aims to address how the liminalities and dualities encompassed by the concept of the Global East contribute to and deepen decolonial (or de-imperial) thought and praxis.