Abstract
The editorial team welcomes you to the second issue of New Perspectives in 2024. This issue contains four excellent articles exploring bordering, populist voting patterns, and authoritarian neoliberalism in Central and Eastern European region, theories of art and resilience, and a report examining evidence of forced mobilisation of young people in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. The issue touches on many of the key issues facing Central and Eastern Europe – migration policy and practice, concerns about authoritarianism and disinformation in the region, the climate crisis, and war – in Ukraine, as well as in Gaza. Here, as ever, New Perspectives seeks to provide a space for the interdisciplinary research, encouraging empirical, theoretical, conceptual, and methodological innovations, and seeing pluralism with respect to approaches and viewpoints as the necessary condition for academic critique.
The issue begins with Stefano Braghiroli and Sandra Hagelin's More than Neighbours: Assessing Crisis Narratives of Nordic-Baltic Elites in the Context of EU’s Eastern Border. In this article, Braghiroli examines elite representations of the Belarusian border crisis (2021) and the travel ban towards Russian citizens (2022), focussing on the Nordic and Baltic Member States. He demonstrates how domestic narratives emerging from the two events, and the European Parliament’s regional groupings, together expose the supranational dimension of the EU decision-making. This article assesses the overlap between national and supranational narratives of borders and the movement of people, through “the prism of regionality and level of governance”, opening up in the process a productive new research agenda setting out to decode “elites’ framing of and behaviour in critical situations where both domestic concerns and European general interest are at stake”.
Our second article is by Fitim Mexhuani and Burim Mexhuani: Authoritarian Neoliberalism Debates: A Critical Review of the Literature in Central and Eastern Europe. This article reviews contemporary debates around authoritarian neoliberalism in Central and Eastern Europe, and explores the contention that neoliberal policies implemented in many countries can lead to the rise of authoritarianism. The review therefore explores the impact of economic policies on democratic institutions and how they may contribute to the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism. In reviewing this contested literature, Mexhuani maps the key points of ongoing debate, and argues that authoritarian neoliberalism persists in CEE by fusing corporate power, state capture and democratic backsliding.
Third we have Mitchell Gallagher with Polling to vaccination stations: Brexit's influence on immunisation uptake, exploring the relationship between disinformation and decision making. Gallagher examines the correlation between populist voting patterns, in the context of the Brexit campaign, and lower vaccination rates during the COVID 19 pandemic. Shedding light on the relationship between Britain and Europe, as well as populism and disinformation in public health. The article shows how the information ecology is linked to evolving societal divisions within democracies, reinforcing the need for further research and action on “developing methods to authenticate information while preserving freedom of speech”.
The final article comes from Shahira Hathout and David Chandler: Posthumous Resilience and Active Withdrawal: Byronic Contemplation of Violence and Vulnerabilities in the Anthropocene Embodied in the Sculpture of the Dying Gaul. Continuing New Perspectives’ tradition of welcoming interdisciplinary works on art and cultural theory, the authors focus on the famous sculpture of the Dying Gaul in order to reread and to rethink discourses of resilience in the Anthropocene. The article seeks to examine the concept of resilience “from a radically different perspective,” drawing theoretical resources from Claire Colebrook, Karen Barad, Christina Sharpe, Dionne Brand and Saidiya Hartman. Developing the concept of ‘Posthumous resilience’, the authors “refuse the lure of affirmation, of imaginaries of salvage and salvation, and instead seeks to generate an ethic of ‘active withdrawal’ that points beyond the temporal and spatial constraints of the colonial, imperial, imagination”. This conceptual tour de force is then deployed to reflect on contemporary violence in Gaza, and the challenge of thinking resilience without affirming the world as it currently exists.
The issue concludes with a report from Olha Pashkova: Student youth of temporary occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions as a mobilization resource of the Russian Federation in armed aggression against Ukraine. Pashkova explores what she describes as “the largest mobilization of a coercive nature on the territory of Ukraine since World War II” focussed on the student population of Donetsk and Luhansk. The report explores the evidence for forced mobilization of the student youth population in these two regions, in the lead up to invasion of 2022 Ukraine, and assesses the implications of this mobilization effort. It concludes that “the male population of the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions came under some degree of forced mobilization organized by the Russian-allied local administrations”. The involvement of the population of the occupied territories of Ukraine of Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the invasion of the territory of Ukraine in 2022 by the armed forces of the Russian Federation has significant implications for the future of the conflict. The author notes that coercive mobilisation is illegal under international law – and for the individuals involved, that the implications include criminal liability under current Ukrainian law – raising potential challenges for post-conflict reconciliation.
The editorial team hopes you enjoy the issue. New Perspectives continues to welcome innovative submissions coming from scholars working in the Central and Eastern European region, and from global scholars engaged with the region and any of the wider issues that impact it.