Mila Mikalay at the Open Conference of the ‘International Relations’

At the Open Conference of the ‘International Relations’ Section of the German Political Science Association at the University of Würzburg (September 21-23), Dr. Mila Mikalay (UCF Governance coordinator) presented her co-authored research with Marek Neuman from University Groningen. Their paper looks into the changes in foreign policy formulation of the European Union and Russia towards Central Asia. They ask whether the war in Ukraine ruptured policy formulation – their analysis shows that it has not. Both the EU and Russia lean more strongly on geopolitical discourse, but there is no groundbreaking strategic repositioning of either of them towards Central Asia – which attests of the path dependency and stickiness of political discourse.