From a Buffer Zone to a Frontline Region? Unmapping Eastern Europe in a Multi-Order World

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has affected the status of Eastern Europe in global life. From a backward ‘buffer zone’ in both European and global affairs, it has emerged at the forefront of ideas, initiatives, and strategies for addressing the turbulent dynamics of world affairs. This ‘Ukraine moment’ does not represent a novel development but has compelled a confrontation with the complex realities of East European unmapping. Unmapping refers to a set of insurgent dispositions which seek to challenge the spatio-ontological cartographies of epistemic provincialisation, geopolitical peripheralisation, and geocultural passivity, in which Eastern Europe appears to have been consigned. It is in their encounter with China during the second decade of the twenty-first century that East European actors began to unmap from the geopolitical semiotics of their stigmatisation by actively navigating the complexity of a multi-order world. They developed two distinct unmapping modalities – that of ‘frontline democracies’ and ‘illiberal democracies’. Both indicate that Eastern Europe is becoming a ‘frontline region’. The experience of East European unmapping demonstrates that while they are located at the interstices of several world orders, frontline regions are anything but the passive recipients of external agency; instead, they are spaces of bordering, debordering, and re-bordering transformations through which regional actors engage in the active selection, priming, and translation of the rules, norms, and practices of different world orders.