About East Europe and Eurasian Security (EEES)
The working group on East Europe and Eurasian Security (EEES) was established in January 2011 in response to the growing need to bring together area studies expertise on the former Soviet Union and those working on similar issues but in areas of security studies and international relations. We seek to promote the work of PhD students and early career researchers in this field through convening panels at the BISA annual conference as well as by holding regular multidisciplinary workshops and study groups.
There is a continuing and growing interest in the former Soviet space in both the area of security studies and foreign policy/international relations. While many issues are examined and written about from an ‘out of area’ perspective (e.g. energy, terrorism, regional security relations), there is a need to focus on cross-linkages between regional and global issues (e.g. Central Asia-Afghanistan-the ‘West’, Russia-Ukraine-NATO/EU) in order to bring together disparate expertise in one forum. Valuable expertise on the subject-area can sometimes be lost to area studies, but we believe this energy should be harnessed to broader disciplinary areas of security studies and foreign policy analysis/international politics.
This group represents an opportunity to achieve a higher profile for the study of the former Soviet Union and wider Eurasian space (not just Russia) and to position this in the context of the broader field.
Recent group member publications include:
- Kurylo, Bohdana (2025). From individual to collective: Vernacular security and Ukrainian civil society in wartime. Security Dialogue, 56(5). https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106251329884. Also in more accessible blog version for the LSE's EUROPP Blog.
- Maracchione, Frank (2025). Uzbekistan in the Global Majority: A protagonist of reglobalisation? Studies on Central Asia and the Caucasus, 2. https://doi.org/10.36253/asiac-3579.
- Maracchione, Frank (2026). Decentring narratives of (de)globalization and crisis: Uzbekistan’s ‘everyday’ political economy amidst Russia’s war in Ukraine. Globalizations, 23(3), 470–490. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2025.2533666.
- Hudson, Victoria. (2025) 'Locating the role of neo-Paganism in far right groups on the Russian socio-political landscape' in Aitamurto, K., & Downing, R. (eds.) The changing faces of Paganisms in Slavic nations. In Germanic and Slavic Paganisms. Security Threats and Resiliency. Bloomsbury Academic, 149-166.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/germanic-and-slavic-paganisms-9781350423916/. - Hall, Stephen, & Maria Debre. (2025). Developing best practices “against terrorists who protest”: Regional organizations as learning clubs for autocracies. Contemporary Security Policy, 46(4), 1225–1254. https://doi.org/10.1080/13523260.2025.2543625.