From a 'Buffer Zone' to a 'Frontline Region'? Unmapping Eastern Europe in a Multi-Order World

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has affected the status of Eastern Europe in global life. From a backward ‘buffer zone’ in both European and global affairs, it has emerged at the forefront of ideas, initiatives, strategies for addressing the turbulent dynamics of world affairs. The claim here is that rather than a novel development, the ‘Ukraine moment’ has merely forced a confrontation with the complex realities of East European unmapping. Unmapping refers to a set of insurgent dispositions which seek to challenge the spatio-ontological cartographies of epistemic provincialization, geopolitical peripheralization, and geocultural passivity in which Eastern Europe appears to have been consigned. The suggestion is that it is in their encounter with China during the second decade of the twenty-first century that East European actors began to unmap from the geopolitical semiotics of their stigmatization by actively navigating the complexity of a multi-order world. As such East European actors developed two distinct unmapping strategies – that of ‘frontline democracies’ and ‘illiberal democracies’. Both of these indicate that Eastern Europe is becoming a ‘frontline region’. The experience of East European unmapping demonstrates that while they are located at the interstices of several world orders, frontline regions are anything but the passive recipients of external agency; instead, they are spaces of transformation where regional actors engage in the active selection, priming, and translation of the rules, norms, and practices of the different world orders.