Resilience and community in international relations: lessons from central Eurasia

In this book launch, Elena Korosteleva will present her new book, Complexity and Community in International Relations: Nurturing Resilience in Central Eurasia.

The book offers an innovative perspective on how communities in Central Eurasia - including Belarus, Ukraine, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia - display a much higher degree of resilience. This is based on centuries-long traditions, social memory, ideas of community and culture to nurture resilience in the face of poverty, climate emergency, conflict, and war. Rather than treating resilience as a mere policy tool, the study reframes it as a complex, communal process of identity, relations-building and a political agency, with capabilities to design more sustainable futures and a lesson for all social and political actors across the globe in the Anthropocene.

Professor Korosteleva's talk will be followed by a discussion with IR scholars and Q&A.

Meet our speaker

Elena Korosteleva is Professor of International Politics and Director of the Institute of Global Sustainable Development (IGSD). In April 2024 Elena was appointed Chair for the Sustainability Spotlight, Warwick-wide interdisciplinary research-focused network to address planetary challenges collectively; and in July 2024 she was elected to be a member of the Scientific Council for COP29. Elena is also a Visiting Professor at Oxford University, and Jean Monnet Chair, which she was awarded twice by the European Commission in recognition of her research and teaching excellence.

Discussants

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster. He edits the journal Anthropocenes - Human, Inhuman, Posthuman and has around 30 books (authored and edited) ranging from work on governing imaginaries of the Anthropocene, digital sensing and mapping, to critiques of liberal and neoliberal paradigms of international intervention - humanitarianism, democracy and rights promotion, human security, peacebuilding, state building and resilience.

Teona Giuashvili is the DINAM Fellow in the Department of International Relations at LSE, pursuing research on EU foreign policy towards Eastern Europe and on the political and security implications of Russia’s war against Ukraine for the EU, NATO and the Black Sea region. Teona is a former Georgian diplomat with over eleven years of experience (2010-2021), having previously served as acting director of the Department of International Organisations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; part of the Georgian delegation to the Geneva International Discussions; deputy head of the Mission of Georgia to the European Union; chargée d’affaires and deputy ambassador of Georgia to France.

Emilian Kavalski is Professor of International Relations at Tampere University in Finland. His work explores the nascent Asian normative orders and the ways in which they confront, compliment, and transform established traditions, norms, and institutions; and the encounter of International Relations with life in the Anthropocene, especially the conceptualization of and engagement with non-human actors. Emilian is also the book series editor for Routledge’s Rethinking Asia and International Relations series and the Central and West Asia Regional Editor for the journal Asian Studies Review.

Chair

Federica Bicchi is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of International Relations at LSE. Her current research focuses on contemporary trends in European diplomacy, especially in relation to the digitalisation of diplomacy and developments in European foreign policy cooperation.

More about this event

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