What is it about?

Abstract This article applies the Foucauldian premise of governmentality and the analytics of government framework to demonstrate how exclusive modalities of power – of the European Union (EU) and Russia – and their competing rationalities relate, intersect and become, counter-intuitively, inextricable in their exercise of governance over the eastern neighbourhood. This particular approach focuses on power as a process to gauge the prospects for compatibility and cohabitation between the EU and Russia. Using original primary evidence, this article contends that cohabitation between these two exclusive power modalities is possible and even inevitable, if they were to legitimise their influence over the contested eastern region. It also exposes a fundamental flaw in the existing power systems, as demonstrated so vividly in the case of Ukraine – that is, a neglect for the essential value of freedom in fostering subjection to one’s authority, and the role of ‘the other’ in shaping the EU–Russian power relations in the contested region. Keywords Analytics of government, eastern neighbourhood, European Union–Russia relations, governmentality, incompatible rationalities

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Why is it important?

The article explains a complex dynamic of relations between contesting powers, by applying governmentality framework onto the case of EU-Russia relations vis-a-vis Ukraine

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This page is a summary of: The European Union, Russia and the Eastern region: The analytics of government for sustainable cohabitation, Cooperation and Conflict, July 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0010836716631778.
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