On 18 November 2021, the director of the Georgian Institute of Politics Prof. Kornely Kakachia was invited to speak at the third event of the edition of the Natolin Neighbourhood Days, which took place under the overarching title: “Post-coloniality in the EU’s Eastern and Southern ‘Neighbourhoods’: Something Old, Something New”. The event was organized by the European Neighbourhood Policy Chair at the College of Europe in Natolin.
The panel discussion, titled: “Looking/Moving beyond the ‘post-Soviet’: EU’s Eastern neighbours and their decolonial drive thirty years aweather?”, applied postcolonial theory as a lens to analyzing major events and developments in Eastern Europe, including the Soviet disintegration and European integration trends, domestic political transformation and troubled democratization.
It also cast a post-colonial perspective on post-Soviet conflicts – especially the Russo-Georgian 2008 war and the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian/Western hybrid conflict. It sought to see the ‘thirty years’ crisis’ in Eastern Europe not only as a manifestation of a broader struggle between Russia and the collective West – but, essentially, as a struggle of states caught ‘in-between’ the EU and Russia for their independence, decoloniality, and the newfound role in regional and wider international politics.
The speakers of the panel discussion were:
- Dr András RÁCZ, Senior fellow in DGAP’s Security and Defense Program;
- Prof Kornely KAKACHIA, Professor of Political Science at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University;
- Dr Mykhailo MINAKOV, Kennan Institute’s Senior Advisor on Ukraine;
- Dr Aliaksei KAZHARSKI, Researcher, Institute of European Studies and International Relations, Comenius University in Bratislava;
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