Description
This panel asks: How do we see and see from South East Europe? Within International Relations (IR), South East Europe has often been discussed, represented, and reproduced from the outside. Where featured, South East Europe becomes a stage on which IR’s theories, ideas, and imaginaries play out. Rarely is South East Europe constituted as a site of seeing IR in and of itself. Drawing together calls to provincialize IR from the region (e.g. Mälksoo 2021) and scholarship from the aesthetic turn in IR (e.g. Bleiker 2001), this panel examines five sites of IR’s making: military recruitment videos from Romania, visual art that invites a complex witnessing of sexual violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), insights from the Manifesta Art Festival in Kosovo, documentaries on rave culture in BiH, as well as reflections on the political imaginaries of Moldovan artists. In this way, papers all engage with creativity, artistry, and visuality from the region in ways that disrupt rigid ways of knowing South East Europe, making space for a more complex reimagining.
