The binary of the Global North and Global South has dominated academic and policy debates since the end of the Cold War, offering a convenient shorthand for global disparities in wealth, power, and knowledge production. But convenience comes at a cost. Categories like these risk oversimplifying the world, erasing the experiences of regions that do not fit neatly within these distinctions. Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is one such region – ambiguous, liminal, and often overlooked within security discourses.
In recent years, Martin Müller’s concept of the ‘Global East’ has attempted to fill this gap, framing CEE and parts of Central Asia as an “epistemic space” distinct from the dominant binaries. While this framework is provocative, it introduces its own set of problems. Does the ‘Global East’ offer a genuine alternative, or does it merely add another layer of essentialism? Could we – and should we – think differently about regions like CEE? And what might such a shift mean for how we conceptualize security and knowledge production? These are urgent questions with profound implications for policymaking and academic research.
The strength of Müller’s concept lies in its recognition of this liminality. It foregrounds the invisibility of regions like CEE in dominant discourses and challenges the assumption that global power is concentrated in a simple North-South axis.
Müller frames the Global East as a relational category, one that transcends the binaries of Global North and South while retaining their structural legacies. For him, this region occupies an ambiguous position: wealthy enough to avoid the outright marginalization faced by much of the Global South, but not fully included in the entitled Global North. Estonia exemplifies this tension: it is a member of the European Union, a digital powerhouse, and a NATO frontline state, yet it remains haunted by past Soviet occupation. Labels like ‘post-socialist’ or ‘Eastern Europe’ suggest a region forever transitioning towards Western modernity – never quite arriving, never quite accepted.
Picture of the Estonian-Russia border town Narva. Source: Private collection, Timothy Anderson.
The strength of Müller’s concept lies in its recognition of this liminality. It foregrounds the invisibility of regions like CEE in dominant discourses and challenges the assumption that global power is concentrated in a simple North-South axis. Yet, as useful as the Global East might be as a critique, it is deeply flawed as a category. Grouping together countries as diverse as Estonia, Belarus, and Kyrgyzstan risks flattening internal distinctions and obscuring critical power dynamics. It creates a mirage of coherence where none exists.
This is not just an academic quibble. The danger of such a category is that it might replicate the very binaries it seeks to disrupt. If the Global East becomes a fixed and essentialized label, it risks obscuring the uneven relationships within and across the region – relationships that are fundamental to understanding its security concerns, migration policies, and geopolitical strategies.
What if we stopped asking whether a country belongs to the Global East or the Global North and started asking what these labels do? Who benefits from them? Who is excluded?
Critics like Tomasz Zarycki have argued that terms like the Global East mask more than they reveal. Within Europe, ‘Eastness’ operates as a projection of marginality – a way for countries to externalize their own anxieties about peripherality. This dynamic points to a deeper problem: categories like the Global East are not neutral descriptors. They are active constructs shaped by the very power structures they claim to critique. In this sense, the Global East does not exist as an “epistemic space,” as Müller would have it, but as an unstable and contested imaginary – a heuristic produced and deployed to serve particular ends.
If the ‘Global East’ is an unconvincing category, then what should replace it? Critical scholars like Parvati Raghuram offer a starting point. Rather than creating new categories, she advocates for relational frameworks that focus on processes and entanglements. For example, instead of asking whether Estonia belongs to the Global East or the Global North, we might ask how its migration policies are shaped by its geopolitical positioning, its historical legacies, and its economic aspirations. This approach does not erase the importance of context but insists on treating regions like CEE as dynamic, interconnected spaces rather than static categories.
Such a shift has implications for security studies. Traditional security discourses often rely on fixed geographical and political boundaries, which fail to account for the lived realities of communities. A relational approach would allow us to see security as a process – something constructed and contested by states, communities, and individuals. It might also illuminate how regions like CEE negotiate their place in a world where state security is increasingly framed in terms of migration, digital infrastructure, and geopolitical alignment.
But the CEEShub should not stop at description. It must also provoke. The aim should not be to replace one category with another but to question the very logic of categorization.
The CEEShub is uniquely positioned to challenge these assumptions. By focusing on evidence-based policymaking, it can disrupt the tendency to essentialize CEE as a category. Instead, the CEEShub can emphasize the plurality of security experiences within the region, from Estonia’s digital sovereignty initiatives to Moldova’s struggles with political destabilization. It could also elevate voices that are often marginalized in security discourses, including migrants, minorities, and local communities.
But the CEEShub should not stop at description. It must also provoke. The aim should not be to replace one category with another but to question the very logic of categorization. What if we stopped asking whether a country belongs to the Global East or the Global North and started asking what these labels do? Who benefits from them? Who is excluded?
The concept of the Global East offers a useful critique of binary thinking, but it cannot stand on its own. To fully engage with the complexities of regions like Central and Eastern Europe, we need frameworks that are relational, dynamic, and open-ended. This is not just an academic exercise – it is a political one. How we describe the world shapes how we act within it. By moving beyond categories, we can develop security discourses that are more inclusive, more accurate, and more just. And in doing so, we might finally see CEE for what it is: not a fixed point on a geopolitical map but a region in motion, full of contradictions, possibilities, and challenges.