Struggles over sovereignty in asymmetrical settings: a mini symposium on peripherisation in the European Union

Mini-Symposium

June 20

Room: 1.A.11

Start: 9:00 AM

End: 3:45 PM

Chair: Amelie Kutter

The proposed mini-symposium explores the argument that, within the European Union and larger political Europe, struggles over sovereignty and local autonomy are not only conditioned by territorial politics and competence division, but also by uneven development and trends of peripherisation. The contributions to the symposium seek to highlight peripherisation and peripherality as a backgrounded disposition of current struggles over sovereignty. Elaborating earlier systematisations (Boatcă 2012, Nagy & Timár 2017, Kutter 2018), they use the concepts of periphery, peripherality, and peripherisation to sharpen an understanding of socio-spatial asymmetries within the European Union. Three axes of peripherisation are explored in three individual panels: peripherisation brought about by differentiated integration in foreign, neighbourhood and overseas policies; the contested rescaling of socio-economic space through crisis management; and the reconfiguration of peripheral spaces through cohesion policies and macroeconomic coordination. In these explorations, different scales and regions are taken into account, while theoretical inspiration is drawn from world systems, empire, state and postcolonial theory, interpretive political economy, sociology, regional planning, anthropology and discourse studies. A shared starting point is the assumption that peripheries are not given, but constantly reconfigured across scales, and are brought about by political agency in dependence of a given conjuncture. The contributions document ongoing discussions of an international network on European peripheries hosted at European University Viadrina. They bring conceptual work of established scholars in dialogue with a rich variety of case studies that focus on Central Eastern and Southern Europe contexts. The symposium welcomes further papers that deal with peripherisation.