Regulating and disciplining the urban environment, especially the sensory improprieties of a city, have always been a crucial means to demonstrate new political orders. This article examines how various authorities attempted to regulate and reshape the Old Town neighbourhood of the Polish city of Lublin during the first half of the twentieth century and how a continuous discourse on order and cleanliness reinforced ethnic, class and political prejudices. It shows how the sensory mapping of the city in pre-war times, including noisome odours, crowdedness and unsightly buildings related, more often than not, to the area’s ‘Jewishness’. The profound changing of the Old Town neighbourhood after the Second World War was a major symbolic act of the new communist regime to make a clean sweep of unpleasant legacies to create the ‘Lublin of the future’.

Inspired by the well-established trope of Eastern Europe’s in-betweenness, this article uses the notion of liminality to explore the images of Eastern Europe during the Cold War in the works of three American authors: John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth. Not only do these works map Eastern Europe as liminal in the imagological sense of the term, that is, as oscillating between competing narratives of otherness and familiarity; empathy and hostility; the East and the West, but also the very experience of venturing behind the Iron Curtain is charged with potentiality: the Eastern-European cityscape becomes the contact zone between cultures and the locus of self-discovery for the American characters. The resultant imaginative geography is at once contemporary and allochronic; political and personal, as it reiterates the Cold War balance of power while at the same time recycling existing representations of the area and reflecting the authors’ sensibilities.

The article discusses uncommemorated sites of violence in the framework of landscape theories. In particular, it asks how the sites of past violence can be understood through the lens of the ‘dynamic’ theory of landscape offered by Tim Ingold in his seminal The Temporality of the Landscape (1993). The ‘dwelling perspective’ he proposes to understand sites as dynamic ‘taskscapes’ allows us to inscribe past violent actions and engagements of local users into today’s meanings of sites of trauma. This conceptualization is further operationalized in relation to George Chamayoux’ philosophical history of manhunts (or more broadly: cynegetic practices, 2012). In the article it has been asked: how can a landscape be ‘pregnant with the past’ – as it is claimed in Ingold’s approach – if the past actions involved tracking, hunting and killing people who tried to escape death in ghettos or camps? How can we ‘read the past’, ‘remember it’ or ‘call back an internal image’ of previous actions developed in the area, if the activity co-constituted an act of genocide? Are we able to read today the past threat of a perpetrator–predator searching for victims, and, if so, with what tools? Can environmental studies help us to understand the uncanny relation to landscapes that connote past manhunts, and violent deaths on killing sites? The author will propose the concept of cynegetic landscapes to approach landscapes of manhunts.

Economic integration has become a general trend in the development of cooperation between states. At the initial stages of integration construction, integration associations are a special kind of international organization. Later, the legal complexes of integration formations stand out and represent separate, independent legal systems (both from international law and from the national (domestic) law of the member states). This article attempts to theoretically generalize, synthesize and develop scientific provisions on integration associations and the legal systems created in them, accumulated in domestic and foreign legal science. The purpose of this study was the formation of a balanced, reasoned position, which fitted modern realities, on the existence of integration law. The methodological basis of the research was formed by a complex of general scientific and special methods for studying legal concepts, institutions and processes in the field of integration law: comparative legal, systemic and structural. Thanks to their application, it becomes possible to identify the general, specific and singular in the activities of integration associations. We managed to substantiate the concept of the formation within the framework of integration associations of our own institutional and legal systems (integration law), which have a close genetic link with international and national law. In our opinion, integration law (or ‘the law of integration formations’) acts as a system that presupposes a single internal structure, hierarchy and mutual consistency of its constituent parts.

Vast territories along the Volga River basin were intentionally submerged in the 1930s to 1980s for the sake of creating the Volga hydropower cascade. Many people suffered displacement, and hundreds of cultural and historical sites were destroyed or left under water. However, these events were never recognized as a national tragedy in the official public narrative. This article is dedicated to a grassroots project aimed at creating a ‘lieu de mémoire’ for this difficult heritage by preserving the ruins of a submerged church. The ruins marking the transformed landscape bear memories of the events that accompanied that transformation as well as the role of an individual and local community in commemorating the traumatic events. Intentionally preserved ruins are extremely rare for Russia, yet they powerfully link tangible and intangible heritage and give voice to repressed narratives.

This article employs the framework of critical infrastructure studies to outline the settler–colonial oppression and decolonial resistance in the Crimean Peninsula. It shows how Soviet and Russian colonialism intertwined ongoing landscape destruction with forced displacements and colonial othering. In addition, it outlines the laborious process of decolonial nourishment to define infrastructure beyond settler terms, questioning what counts as such. The text counters Russian colonial understanding of infrastructure that could not comprehend indigenous Crimean Tatar irrigation systems, constructed through intimate relations with soil and water rather than large-scale geoengineering. The Crimean Tatar water infrastructures are considered, in line with other forms of resistance, as ones of decolonial care. They create the possibility of a future which goes against that imposed by the Russian state.

The aim of this article is to propose the methodological and conceptual tool of ‘recursion’ as a means of understanding the production of historical continuity and discontinuity between different forms of nationalism in Bulgaria. The recent case of the demolition of the socialist-modernist monument ‘1300 Years of Bulgaria’ and its replacement with an earlier memorial from the authoritarian period of the 1930s forms the point of departure for this examination. Adopting a media and cultural studies perspective, the text focuses on the symbolic function of lions in both monuments and how they are engaged in the production of nationalist rhetoric and imagery. In line with Ann Laura Stoler’s (2016) proposition that the method of ‘recursive analytics’ can allow us to overcome the impasse formed by attempts to postulate either continuity or rupture between present and past, I first account for the histories of the erection of both monuments before proposing to read the ‘Bulgarian lions’, featuring in both of them, as recursive figures.

This article studies the mechanics through which the EU’s relations with China may harm its values and institutions, providing specific examples that precisely illustrate the Chinese Communist Party’s malign influence in Europe. It also intends to reflect on the extent to which the two distinct political and economic models are compatible with the preservation of a liberal international order. Accordingly, we aim to assess whether the EU has the capacity to counteract China’s sharp power, highlighting concrete policy actions that help strengthen the EU’s position while also identifying persisting shortcomings. It is argued that the EU has considerable economic deterrence to push China into respecting global defined rules and arrangements. Indeed, recent reforms, such as the investment screening mechanism and the global sanctions regime, were an important step towards the affirmation of an EU committed to its values. However, the unanimity requirement in the Common Foreign and Security Policy’s decision-making will likely remain a relevant obstacle for a coherent and efficient EU’s external action.