No alternative but Europeanisation. Slow violence and critical imaginaries in/from/with South East Europe

Maria-Adriana Deiana, Katarina Kušić

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Abstract

This chapter centres the post-Yugoslav space as a productive vantage point for understanding the multifarious forms of violence through which Europeanisation proceeds around the world. It builds on rich intellectual dialogues from/about the region that, mobilising wider epistemological frames shaped by intersecting postcolonial, postsocialist and post-conflict legacies, posit the region as a site of knowledge production about global politics, rather than as an object of intervention, as predominantly understood in mainstream IR narratives. From this vantage point, the chapter illustrates how Europeanisation engenders a complex set of affective registers and material effects that ‘entrap’ the post-Yugoslav space in a never-ending transition towards the cruel promises of Europeanisation. Conceptualising this affective/material impasse as slow violence, the chapter unpacks the region’s ambivalent positioning as both the Balkan other in need of EU intervention and containment, and its accomplice in racialised logics of spectacular and everyday violence at the core of the European project and its b/ordering. At the same time, it proposes the post-Yugoslav space as a site of critical imaginaries and alternative solidarities emerging from creative cultural interventions and social movements that challenge the violence of Europeanisation. The chapter argues that attending to these complexities refracted through the region contributes to an interrogation of Europeanisation as violence from multiple positionings, spotlighting global entanglements in the politics of race and Empire, as well as activating resonances across seemingly unrelated histories and struggles.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEuropeanisation as violence. Souths and Easts as method
EditorsKolar Aparna, Daria Krivonos, Elisa Pascucci
PublisherManchester University Press
Chapter5
Pages101-119
ISBN (Electronic)9781526174741
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 21 Jan 2025

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