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 provincialisation, geopolitical peripheralisation, 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 stigmatisation by actively navigating the complexity of a multi-order world. They 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 bordering, debordering, and re-bordering transformations through which regional actors engage in the active selection, priming, and translation of the rules, norms, and practices of different world orders.

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the European Union (EU) has reinvigorated its enlargement agenda, bringing renewed focus to the complexities of Europeanisation via enlargement. This article argues for a new relational approach to Europeanisation via enlargement, which allows us to fully capture the political and relational dynamics of the process. In doing so, it seeks to shift the focus from outcomes-driven analyses that tend to take the EU for granted, to an analysis driven by the core research question: What tensions are generated within the political integration process, in what forms do they manifest, and how are they negotiated? Reconceptualising enlargement as a process of negotiated transitions, the relational approach highlights how EU rules, norms, and values are co-constructed, contested, and redefined through ongoing transactions between the EU and candidate countries. It embraces the interdependencies between actors and policy fields, while challenging assumptions about EU hegemony and the static nature of European values. By foregrounding the political dimensions of the Europeanisation process, the relational approach argues for a long-durée analysis that emphasises outcome-in-process. This allows for the introduction of the concept of ‘tactical Europeanisation’ to illustrate how candidate countries, through acts of doublespeak, navigate and instrumentalise EU conditions, performing alignment with EU norms externally while domestically hollowing them out. Ultimately, this article provides a critical lens to EU enlargement, de-centring the EU, and taking candidate countries’ agency seriously, while placing the enlargement process within its wider international context.

This article examines the role of strategic narratives in the context of the European Union’s geopolitical turn. Focusing on the narratives surrounding Georgia’s EU candidacy application, it explores how these narratives function in geopolitical settings as bordering practices. The analysis unfolds in four parts. First, the conceptual framework based on strategic narratives explores how relational approaches can contribute to the understanding of emerging narratives and bordering practices. Second, a methodological section outlines the empirical approach to study strategic narratives. Third, through engaging with Georgia’s EU candidacy application process, the paper analyses how a group of civil society organisations, as a community of practice, narrate Georgia’s candidacy to address the geopolitical tensions. In conclusion, the paper discusses how these civil society organisations use strategic narratives as a practice, to address geopoliticisation relationally.

While recent studies have started to shift the focus from exploring the EU’s externalisation of its standards to neighbouring countries in a simplistic way to looking for more variation in dynamics, such as reciprocity, related works remain analytically and empirically underdeveloped. To fill this gap, this article first provides a novel framework for the operationalisation of the dynamics marking EU external engagement. Acknowledging that the macro-political and the meso-sectoral levels are decoupled in policy making and treating the EU and its relations as complex webs of relationality involving various actors, the article understands sectoral engagement to be characterised by decentralised ownership and cross-fertilisation. In empirical terms, it studies knowledge transfer in policing between two EU sectoral bodies – Europol and CEPOL – and the domestic law enforcement authorities of five Eastern Neighbourhood countries. Providing original empirical evidence, the research demonstrates how EU-Neighbourhood relations unfolding within ‘decentralised’, sector-level networks can be co-constitutive, drawing on the dynamics of tailored externalisation and the co-construction of standards.

The thought, times, and untimely death of Walter Benjamin were profoundly shaped by geopolitics. Known for his work on the nature of violence and what he called the “Angel of History”, Benjamin’s legacy permeates political and social theory from Arendt to Agamben. Yet producers and practitioners of geopolitics per se, have barely engaged with his insights. This piece – in conversation with the essays on European bordering practices featured in this special issue – engages with Benjamin on the relationship between violence, history, progress and justice. The paper argues that despite the cascading crises shaping what many term the “return of history” or “great power politics”, ordinary political actors’ ability to learn relationally in situated contexts offers at least a partial antidote to exclusionary and combative approaches to global politics.