The neighborhood policies of regional powers play an increasingly important role in the process of emergence of the multipolar world order, and are being regarded by scholars from different disciplines as important tools of influence and shaping of the new world order.
The aim of this seminar is to analyze the neighborhood policies of selected regional powers from the perspective of space discussion in the globalization research. This implies the discussion and analysis of different approaches of regional powers to the design of neighborhood policies after the end of the East-West conflict on the basis of theory debates concerning the construction of space and recent research findings in this field.
The first sessions of the seminar will be focused on the state of the art in the field of new regionalisms, the role of space in the globalization debate, the competing development models of regional powers, and last but not least the definition and discussion of the key concepts that will be used in this course.
The next sessions will build on this theoretical and analytical ground and will examine the neighborhood policies of four regional powers as competing space formats. These sessions will include an in depth discussion on approaches, development histories, specific features and the interaction between the Neighborhood Policies of the European Union, the Russian Federation, Turkey and Iran.
In the last part of the seminar, the intended and unintended effects of the competing spatial formats on the contested neighborhood of the respective regional powers will be discussed and analyzed. In these sessions we will work with representative case studies and will use the main findings of research, relevant documents and other empirical data.
We will work in this seminar with academic texts in English and some texts in German. The knowledge of other relevant languages such as Russian, Turkish or Persian would be beneficial for the access to other perspectives on the topic of this seminar, but they are not a prerequisite for the participation in the course.