Europeanisation as Violence: Souths and Easts Method

The book explores the violence enacted on Europe’s many internal and external Souths and Easts through forms of political, cultural and security-development related “Europeanisation”. It proposes inter-referencing between South and East as a space of political possibilities emerging through and despite of the violence of Europeanisation. This book presents a fresh perspective on Europeanisation, framing it as a form of violence hidden within dominant narratives of progress. Through this lens, it expands the established postcolonial and postsocialist critical toolkit and explores the complex legacies of these frameworks. The volume contextualises historical processes and genealogies of Europeanisation in relation to labour, race, gender, infrastructure, heritage, memory and settler expansion, among others. Chapters in Europeanisation as violence stitch together a wide array of geo-histories of violence, highlighting how different regions – from the postwar ‘Recovered Territories’ of Western Poland to Madagascar, Ukraine to the Dutch East Indies, Andalusia to Transylvania, and the Western Balkans to EuroAfrica – are linked through shared histories of violence and relational territorial production. The analysis spans diverse regions, including Yemen, the Mediterranean and Sahelo-Sahara, Chad and the Central African Republic, and Finland. This volume is an invitation to build theories across peripheries and in defiance of traditional imperial and national boundaries; a methodology the authors call ‘Souths and Easts as method’. The book offers a novel lens to situate Europeanisation as violence – through institutions and technologies of development, cultural heritage, and borders, among others – by bringing South and East within a relational frame. Through four inter-related sections, it foregrounds Europeanisation as infrastructural violence and colonial asymmetries, slow violence and the construction of stratified subalternities, epistemic dispossession, and border epistemologies.