ABSTRACT Borders are increasingly understood not as fixed territorial lines, but as dispersed and shifting regimes enacted through law, bureaucracy, spatial regulation, and everyday governance. While scholarship on migration control has traced these dynamics through concepts such as externalisation, internal bordering, and bureaucratic bordering, most analyses have focused on the Global North. This article examines how such dynamics unfold in a major refugee-hosting state in the Global South. Focusing on Lebanon’s response to Syrian displacement, it argues that the Lebanese state adopted a deliberate strategy of shifting the border in: relocating enforcement from the territorial frontier to domestic legal, spatial, and administrative domains. It traces this strategy through three interlocking mechanisms: the strategic blurring of the categories of ‘refugee’ and ‘displaced’, the delegation of enforcement to municipalities through curfews and local restrictions, and the imposition of opaque and exclusionary residency requirements. Together, these mechanisms created a fragmented but durable regime of internal bordering that denied Syrians access to protection while allowing the state to avoid both formal recognition and overt mass expulsion. Based on fieldwork conducted in Lebanon between 2015 and 2016, with follow-up research in 2019 and 2021, and combining interviews with discourse and policy analysis, the article shows how legal ambiguity, decentralisation, and selective enforcement can function not as signs of state failure, but as techniques of governing displacement and denying protection.

ABSTRACT This article advances efforts to decolonise the study of civil war by conceptualising warscapes as relational conjunctures. While the warscapes literature emphasises how conflict reshapes local socio-political relations, a conjunctural approach highlights how warscapes emerge from dynamic interrelations between multi-scalar social processes, producing seeming contradictions within local landscapes of war. These intersections also reveal the lasting but uneven legacies of colonialism and postcolonial statebuilding on contemporary civil wars and their spatiality. Applying this framework to post-coup Myanmar, the article challenges two dominant portrayals of the conflict – as binary (‘us against them’) or irretrievably fragmented (‘many against many’) – for being state-centric and for obscuring colonial and postcolonial continuities. Instead, the article provides a conjunctural analysis of southeast Myanmar, which has incubated both democratic revolutionary politics and criminalised economies since the 2021 coup. It links these apparent contradictions to historic social processes that continue to generate tensions within Karen ethnonationalism.

For more than three decades after the Cold War, the international system was widely described as unipolar, defined by U.S. military primacy, the global reach of American alliances, and Washington’s outsized influence over international institutions and economic rules. While this unipolar moment was never as absolute as its advocates claimed, it nonetheless shaped global expectations: […]

The year is 2025 and Europe is facing “civilizational erasure.” Well, not entirely…A small group of “patriotic parties” still holds out against the invaders. But life is not easy for the U.S. Ambassadors who try to fortify the garrisons of AfD, RN, and Fidesz… This paraphrase of the opening lines of the Asterix comic book […]

A recent research project by the Eastern Neighborhood Bulletin examined why the Georgian Dream remained in power following Georgia’s contested October 2024 parliamentary elections, the subsequent November-December protest wave, and ongoing protests throughout 2025. Drawing on structured reflections from the experts on Georgian politics based in Georgia, Europe, and the United States, the study sought […]

Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan, once described the relationship between his country and Israel as “like an iceberg” with most of its mass “below the surface,” invisible to the public eye. This striking metaphor appeared in a 2009 diplomatic cable, later revealed by WikiLeaks, in which Aliyev noted that “nine-tenths” of the Azerbaijani-Israeli relationship remained […]

Higher education in Georgia is under attack. The outlines of this aggressive assault are well understood by now. A previous article by Sergi Kapanadze in GEOpolitics has described the contours of the planned subjugation in more detail. As Kapanadze points out, the proposed changes move Georgia “towards a system where higher education becomes a branch […]

ABSTRACT 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.

ABSTRACT This article examines the interplay between securitisation, policy networks, sovereignty, and the spatialisation of power in addressing Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing as a transnational environmental crime (TEC). It explores how large and smaller states combat IUU fishing while asserting sovereignty amid territorial disputes in the South China Sea (SCS) and the Indian Ocean. TEC, valued at US$1 trillion annually, undermines state sovereignty by disrupting economies and border controls. ASEAN, promoting regional cooperation since 1967, offers governance insights for the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA). Hosting the world’s busiest sea lanes, ASEAN and IORA face severe maritime security challenges. Territorial disputes in the SCS and shifting Indo-Pacific power dynamics further complicate ocean governance. This article assesses ASEAN’s relevance for IORA, the securitisation of IUU fishing, its implications for sovereignty and power spatialisation, and how governance frameworks contrast with major powers’ maritime territorialisation strategies.