Living in the split: The agency of Armenia and Georgia in-between Russia and the EU

Abstract

Presenter: Dr Louise Amoris (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) Discussant: Professor Tracey German (King’s College London) The draft paper examines the agency of the in-between countries in the European Union’s (EU) and Russia’s shared neighbourhood, viewed as subjects of international relations caught in-between two competing hegemonic regional cores. It offers a new outlook on these actors away from the dominant trend in International Relations (IR) that primarily depicts them through representations of victimhood and passivity, as mere objects in the hands of regional powers. Since the early 2000s, the EU and Russia have engaged in a growing competition over their shared neighbourhood, each developing regional initiatives that would encompass the countries in-between. While the various aspects of this competition and the constraints it imposes on the in-between countries have been widely covered, little is known about how the latter can turn this seemingly uncomfortable position into a resource for agency. Focusing on the cases of Georgia and Armenia, the paper discusses how the in-between countries construct their subjectivity from their state of in-betweenness and make it a source of constitutive power in the framework of their foreign policy.