Complexity and Community in International Relations: Nurturing Resilience in Central Eurasia

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Complexity and Community in International Relations offers a unique perspective on resilience-nurturing in Central Eurasia, spanning Belarus and Ukraine in the west, South Caucasus in the south, and Tajikistan in the east. Steeped in centuries-long traditions, social memory, and culture, this vast geography suffers from rampaging poverty, climate emergency, democratic struggles, and conflict, with global consequences for the planet.

In this volume, Korosteleva explores how Central Eurasia avidly showcases a remarkable and different type of resilience, being deeply ideational, spiritual, and always communal. She argues that the resilient subject there is never alone, unable to cope. Instead, it is always tightly woven into the community of relations, through social memory and imaginaries of the good life, support infrastructures, and affective relations.

The author demonstrates how this resilient subject, when faced with adversity or war, becomes powerfully agential, in not only learning to cope, but to transform in response to change, and to engage proactively in designing their better alternative futures. Resilience, she states, will come to encapsulate an almost revolutionary process of community's worlding into a universe of more-than-human complex relations, attuned to the precarious conditions of the Anthropocene and, more crucially, able to act on them, collectively.

Elena Korosteleva, Professor of Politics and Global Sustainable Development, the Institute for Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick

Elena Korosteleva is Professor of Politics and Global Sustainable Development, and Director of the Institute for Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick. She is the author/editor of over 100 publications, including fourteen books, and her research interests lie on the intersection of Complex International Relations and Development Studies. She regularly advises the UK Foreign Office, Westminster, and EU Institutions. Her GCRF COMPASS project received higher commendation by the Times Higher Education as the Best International Collaboration of 2021. She was a co-founder of Oxford Belarus Observatory (2021), and a founder of Warwick Ukraine-Belarus hub (WUB-hub).