Do international relations scholars not care about Central and Eastern Europe or do they just take the region for granted? A conclusion to the special issue

Abstract

How can we explain Central and Eastern Europe’s (CEE) relative absence in the ‘worlding International Relations’(IR) conversation? What does provincializing the discipline from CEE might look like? I argue that CEE has been relatively neglected in the ‘worlding IR’ literature 1) due to local factors, 2) because it might have been turned into an ‘unimportant other’, 3) and because the history of the region challenges the macro-categories – ‘West/non-West’, ‘North/South’, ‘core/periphery’ – that structure this conversation. I show how the special issue offers promising endeavors to provincialize IR that are transferable to other contexts, for instance small states. Doing so, I use CEE as a case study to build a bridge between the special issue and the different debates it contributes to – making IR a less Eurocentric/parochial field, decentering European IR from the IR produced in UK/Scandinavian countries, and exploring the conditions of formulating critiques that produces something other than the problems they denounce.