Description
With the efforts to globalise, provincialise, and decolonise International Relations (IR), scholars working on South East Europe (SEE) have both problematised the existing uses of SEE within IR (Mälksoo 2021), and pointed to SEE experiences as capable of illuminating diverse global developments (Hozić, Subotić, Vučetić 2020). As the world turns to emergency politics and questions of survival, it becomes crucial to further stay with this project of thinking from SEE as a space that has been, and still is, often understood through discourses of crisis.
In this roundtable, we thus survey the new directions in researching South East Europe within IR. These new directions reflect on the hierarchies of knowledge production involved in identifying ‘area studies,’ critically engage with international political economies of post-socialist transitions, connect arts and arts-based methods within IR to shed light on the creation and transformation of political communities, and inquire into lived experiences of militarism. The roundtable thus imagines a global study of SEE — instead of isolationism, we use SEE as an epistemic space that allows researchers to remain attuned to the pressing questions of global politics. In opening space for the discussion of innovative conceptual and methodological approaches, we think through the politics of how international politics are made in and remake South East Europe.
