Captive Minds, Subaltern Subjects? The Function and Agency of Eastern Europe in International Security Studies

Historically an object of rather than a subject in international security politics, Eastern Europe (EE) and the region’s specific insecurities are conventionally thought to have hardly informed theory-building in International Security Studies (ISS). Nor does the region with its constituents’ relatively young and occasionally disrupted state-and nation-building, and an obsession with state security thereof, appear as a primary candidate for ‘globalising IR’, commonly associated with overcoming state-focused analysis of international relations. What would it mean to rethink security from the subaltern perspective of EE? Through a critical discourse analysis of the ways EE has featured as a space, trope, and scholarly origin in the major ISS/IR journals over the past quarter-century, this paper delineates the intellectual import-export patterns between ISS and EE area studies. Conceptualising EE and the pertinent area studies as a pattern-effect in the circulatory system of knowledge generation about international security, I contend that EE has been instrumental for the ISS subfield as an exemplary student of the Western theory and practice of IR (‘captive minds’). EE has served as a ritual space for exercising the civilizing mission of the West and testing the related theories (security community building, democratisation, modernisation, Europeanisation, norm diffusion) in practice.