In Search of the Global East: Thinking between North and South

Abstract

Carving up the world into Global North and Global South has become an established way of thinking about global difference since the end of the Cold War. This binary, however, erases what this paper calls the Global East — those countries and societies that occupy an interstitial position between North and South. This paper problematizes the geopolitics of knowledge that has resulted in the exclusion of the Global East, not just from the Global North and South, but from notions of globality in general. It argues that we need to adopt a strategic essentialism to recover the Global East for scholarship. To that end, it traces the global relations of IKEA’s bevelled drinking glass to demonstrate the urgency of rethinking the Global East at the heart of global connections, rather than separate from them. Thinking of such a Global East as a liminal space complicates the notions of North and South towards more inclusive but also more uncertain theorizing.

Invisibilizing Eurasia: How North–South Dichotomization Marginalizes Post-Soviet Scholars in International Research Collaborations

“…In a recent article “In Search of the Global East: Thinking between North and South,” Martin Müller (2018) discussed how the use of North–South categorization in political science has led after the end of the Cold War to disappearance from the geopolitical map of the world of what he refers to as the Global East. Müller (2018) reminded the reader about the existence of another ax in the political organization of the world before the fall of the Soviet Union—the West-East dimension, where the West, also referred to as the “First World,” represented the capitalist, whereas the East, also referred to as the “Second World,” represented the communist countries. With the collapse of communism, the distinction between the West and the East has evaporated and the Second world fell through the cracks (Müller, 2018, p. 2).…”

“…Müller (2018) reminded the reader about the existence of another ax in the political organization of the world before the fall of the Soviet Union—the West-East dimension, where the West, also referred to as the “First World,” represented the capitalist, whereas the East, also referred to as the “Second World,” represented the communist countries. With the collapse of communism, the distinction between the West and the East has evaporated and the Second world fell through the cracks (Müller, 2018, p. 2). The author explains why this “act of disappearance” happened:The East is too rich to be a proper part of the South but too poor to be a part of the North.…”

“…As a result of the misrecognition, according to Müller (2018), the East experiences dual exclusion. It is not included in writings about the Global South and is “a silent bystander” in writings about the Global North, frequently perceived as “being on the way northward, but at the same time .…”

“…. stuck in an eternal transition towards elusive modernity” and in “the liminal position of in-betweenness, of being lost between the Global North and the Global South” (Müller, 2018, p. 3). In his paper, Müller (2018) also argued that as a result of its interstitial existence, the East remains inert, remaining in stasis, “fallen out of place and time” (p. 4) and not being a part of global connections and processes (Rogers, 2010) as if remaining hidden behind the iron curtain (Müller, 2018, p. 4).…”

“…Müller’s (2018) argument can be developed further as we focus on the implication of invisibilization of the East, Eurasia in particular, in the global knowledge production system and in the dynamics of international research collaborations. Although Müller (2018) understand the East more generically, including in the notion of the East all countries which are transitioning from communism to neoliberalism, for the purposes of the paper, we will narrow the notion of the East to post-Soviet Eurasia, which includes the countries of the former Soviet Union with the exclusion of those countries, which became the part of the European Union (the Baltic republics and Ukraine).…”