Complexity and Community in International Relations

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Complexity and Community in International Relations offers a unique perspective on resilience-nurturing in Central Eurasia, spanning Belarus and Ukraine in the west, South Caucasus in the south, and Tajikistan in the east. Steeped in centuries-long traditions, social memory, and culture, this vast geography suffers from rampaging poverty, climate emergency, democratic struggles, and conflict, with global consequences for the planet. In this volume, Korosteleva explores how Central Eurasia avidly showcases a remarkable and different type of resilience, being deeply ideational, spiritual, and always communal. She argues that the resilient subject there is never alone, unable to cope. Instead, it is always tightly woven into the community of relations, through social memory and imaginaries of the good life, support infrastructures, and affective relations. The author demonstrates how this resilient subject, when faced with adversity or war, becomes powerfully agential, in not only learning to cope, but to transform in response to change, and to engage proactively in designing their better alternative futures. Resilience, she states, will come to encapsulate an almost revolutionary process of community's worlding into a universe of more-than-human complex relations, attuned to the precarious conditions of the Anthropocene and, more crucially, able to act on them, collectively.