Geopolitics, (In)security and Resilience. A Feminist Critique of the EU's Engagement in Armenia After the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War

Abstract

This article interrogates the EU's ‘geopolitical turn’ by examining its external engagement in Armenia after the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and in the shadow of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on feminist approaches to geopolitics and post-socialist coloniality, it asks whose security is served by a ‘geopolitical’ EU in Armenia and how this is received by differently situated populations on the ground. Through fieldwork conducted in Armenia's Syunik province and beyond, the article unravels dominant notions of security, resilience and geopolitics in the EU's external action by showing how these are enacted and rewritten across multiple scales. The article finds that the EU's security and resilience-building engagement in Syunik serves to reproduce its own ‘geopolitical’ identity whilst simultaneously co-producing insecurities in and around Armenia. It foregrounds everyday practices, embodied experiences and intimate spaces as key sites where hegemonic security paradigms and neo-imperial rivalries are made and contested from the bottom-up.