Natolin Senior Research Fellow Dr Andriy TYUSHKA Co-Edited the 2025 Special Issue of the European Security Journal
Dr Andriy TYUSHKA, Senior Research Fellow in the European Neighbourhood Chair at the College of Europe in Natolin, has co-edited with Prof. Tracey GERMAN (Defence Studies Department, King’s College London) the 2025 special issue of the European Security journal on “Perks and Perils of Geostrategic In-Betweenness: Theoretical and Empirical Insights from within the EU-Russia (Un)Common Neighbourhood”, featuring one of his own and two co-authored articles.
While research on the nature, ways and effects of EU-Russia competition in their “common neighbourhood” has proliferated over the past two decades, little attention has been paid so far to analysing the implications of such a geopolitical struggle for those states caught “in-between” the two power poles.
This Special Issue seeks to address the current gap in the literature, with a particular focus on how the lasting sense of geostrategic “inbetweenness” has shaped the strategic and security cultures, as well as foreign policy choices, of those states located “in-between” the EU and Russia (the EU’s six Eastern Partnership countries, which at the same time form part of Russia’s “post-Soviet space”).
Additionally, it intends to advance theoretical and conceptual debate on geostrategic “inbetweenness” as well as make an original empirical contribution to a better understanding of what underwrites “in-between” states’ choices in terms of their foreign and security policy models, and the drivers of continuity and change, against a backdrop of dynamic strategic interactions between the EU and Russia.
The special issue can be accessed here.
Dr TYUSHKA's further (co-)authored SI contributions conceptualizing “geostrategic inbetweenness” seen from within the EU-Russia “(un)common neighbourhood”, outlining the in-between states’ geostrategies of defying and/or deploying their inbetweenness, as well as the concluding debate on “perks and perils” of geopolitical inbetweenness can be consulted below:
Eastern Europe post-February 2022 – embracing geostrategic “in-betweenness” or bracing against it?