A critical relational perspective on peace & security in CEE


Benjamin Klasche, Tallinn University

Russia’s war against Ukraine has alerted us to the need to think about security in a more holistic, intersectional and in a deeply relational way. The war is primarily told and analyzed from the perspective of the great powers and the West and in terms of military security. To the extent that other voices are included, they typically link up to these dominant discourses. This creates a blind spot for what the story would be if told from the perspective of small states, Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), and non-military security. The effect is an unfortunate polarization and dichotomization of political and academic debates. This project aims to (re)discover the marginalized voices and to unpack the agency of the actors behind these voices in order to reconstruct academic and practical political middle grounds with important implications for understanding the prospects for peaceful change in Europe and a viable European security architecture. Our starting point is to acknowledge the fundamental connectedness of two questions typically siloed and kept apart in both mainstream security research and policy-making: whose security matters and who can speak security in regional and global politics. These questions, as noted by scholars of critical security studies (CSS) in the plural, identify the key security problematique in Russia’s war in Ukraine as well as in regional and global politics in general: the present international security thinking has relegated the majority world, and marginalised groups in the Global North (GN) to a perpetual state of insecurity.

This paper will be presented at the following session: