The Baltic Sea Region region is often presented as a prime example of new regionalism, desecuritisation, transnational environmental cooperation, and new forms of governance. Consisting of eight EU member states and the Russian Federation, the region, which has a long history of cooperation and conflict, serves as a microcosm where east and west, and also north and south, come together. A number of selected legacies bound together societies across the region, leaving tangible imprints on the processes of state-building and institution-making. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, states and societies across the region have embarked upon unique transitional paths and adopted specific strategies of socio-political development and the governance of the processes related to it.
The course provides the students with basic knowledge on the ways through which politics and governance in the Baltic Sea region are gradually taking new forms at the age of "globalization", including the ways in which small and marginal states/nations define their role in the international order. These issues are further placed in relation to wider contexts of global politico-economic fashions which have taken rather different forms in different parts of the BSR. Given the rapid territorial expansion of the EU coupled with an increasing political potential of the Union, this course also aims at providing the students with basic knowledge of the processes of "Europeanization" in the European North and of the ways in which the EU is using its transformative and normative power to mould its internal and external environments (neighborhoods), including North-West Russia.