Conference Agenda

The agency of the in-between countries in the EU’s and Russia’s shared neighbourhood has been largely overlooked in International Relations, where they are often portrayed as passive victims in the hands of regional powers. This research challenges that perspective, demonstrating how these countries – particularly Armenia and Georgia – can be active agents capable of shaping their own futures and that of the region. Focusing on the period from 2008 to early 2024, it explores how Armenia and Georgia use their liminal subjectivity in-between two competing regional cores as a resource for agency in the framework of their foreign policy.

Relying on a poststructuralist approach to discourse analysis, this research delves into Armenia’s and Georgia’s evolving identity and foreign policy discourse, revealing how they (re-)articulate their role identity. It highlights how their agency produces both reproductive and subversive effects on the hegemonic structures, while creating divisive and connective representations of their regional environment. Georgia, as a marginal liminal, positioned itself as a barrier and outpost for the EU, whereas Armenia, as a hybrid liminal, positioned itself more as a bridge between the EU and Russia. However, the analysis reveals that both Armenia and Georgia have significantly reshuffled their liminality and related agency over the covered period.

Inspired by a postcolonial research agenda, this study gives a voice to subaltern actors entangled in hierarchical structures. By examining agency through the lens of liminality and its interplay with ontological (in)security, it contributes to the growing trend in International Relations that emphasises the specific voices and agency of countries in the EU’s and Russia’s neighbourhood, departing from the dominant Eurocentric and Russo-centric views on the region.

Informed by an understanding of ontological security as a two-way relationship between physical and psychological security (Krickel-Choi 2022), this article explores the effects of the rupture in Armenia’s ontological security narrative (Amoris 2024) following the 2020 war against Azerbaijan. We show that not only the ’44-day’ war, but also Azerbaijan’s repeated territorial encroachments on Armenia proper, full takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh, and threats to the Armenian state have triggered existential anxiety in a region already marked by uncertainty and instability, which were exacerbated by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on two series of interviews conducted with Armenian officials, experts, civil society representatives, and EU officials in 2022 and 2024, we examine Armenia’s management of this ‘existential anxiety’ as both ‘a fundamental need and ongoing political practice’ (Kinnvall and Mitzen 2020). We identify a twofold response: first, Armenia has crafted a biographical narrative reflecting a new sense of self-identity (Steele 2006); second, the country has sought to reduce uncertainty by developing new routinised relationships (Mitzen 2006) with newly significant others, in particular the European Union. By focusing on the management of anxiety as a political practice, we shed light on a neglected aspect of ontological security: anxiety as a creative force. Rather than solely viewing anxiety as destabilising, we regard it as a source of reflexive capacity enabling individuals and actors to adapt their routines and identities to new circumstances (Browning and Joenniemi 2017). This approach highlights Armenia’s ability to cope with uncertainty and change, reframing anxiety as a catalyst for resilience and innovation.

The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has irrevocably transformed the post-Cold War European order. For the countries situated in the “shared neighbourhood” between the EU and Russia, strategic choices about regional integration have acquired new urgency and existential meanings. This shift is exemplified by the swift EU membership applications of Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, and by Armenia’s reassessment of its foreign policy following Russia’s failure to act as a reliable security partner during its recent war with Azerbaijan. To systematically describe and explain the shifting foreign and security policies of these four countries over the past thirty years, this paper applies the concept of liminality - a condition of being in a transitional or in-between state vis-à-vis dominant social structures. Applications of the concept of liminality to International Relations resulted in accounting for multiple ways in which liminal states interact with the dominant order of international politics – from self-domestication to hybridization and even subversion. The main aim of this paper is to analyze how the countries in the EU-Russia neighbourhood interact with their regional order increasingly defined by conflict and contestation. By conducting a comparative study, this paper asks whether and how major security threats and their perception, domestically as well as internationally, lead liminal states to choose some of these strategies over others. Theoretically, it contributes to the discussion about the dialogic and mutually constitutive relationship in which the structure confronts liminality as much as liminality affects the structure.