Participants

Discussion

This roundtable draws on the activities of the ESRC Network Plus: Shifting Global Polarities which aims to address the societal challenges evident across a region encompassing Russia, China, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Central and Eastern Asia. A main emphasis of this initiative is to understand the linkages and dynamics of a complex region, characterised by a range of destabilising geopolitical, socio-economic and environmental trends. 

The roundtable consists of academics and practitioners with regional expertise ranging from politics/geopolitics, socio-environmental change, gender, themes of mobility and forced population displacement, and health policy.

The roundtable is organised around the Network’s four organising themes: orders, interactions, anxieties and implications. Related questions include: Where are we seeing existing forms of order eroded or replaced? What new orderings - informal or formal - are we seeing emerge? How are movements of people or goods shaping regional relations and dependencies? How are transborder environmental effects shaping relations? How confident are we that we have deep insight into regionally-specific anxieties? What risks do those living and working in the region see as most pressing?

Key questions to be addressed as part of the roundtable include: How is the region to be conceptualised? What does an effective language-based Area Studies agenda look like? How might academics and policymakers work together meaningfully in order to advance insight into the region’s interconnectivity and fluidity? What are the implications for the UK in a world of increasing geopolitical, economic and ideological competition?