Margaryta Rymarenko

With the background in Human Geography and Area Studies I find the focus on regionalism and regional integration particularly exciting. In my PhD research i focus on regional organization as political actors and their relations with external great powers. My dissertation examines how and why regional orders transform into cooperative or conflictual security environments. It develops a role theory approach to the understanding of regional security dynamics, which emphasizes processes of role bargaining between key regional actors and their governance practices. It argues that the co-impact of these two processes determines whether cooperative or conflictual security patterns develop in a region. The framework is applied to examine the evolution of the intersubjective security environments in EU-Russia and ASEAN-China interaction from the end of the Cold War until 2017 and specific case studies: the EU-Russia confrontation over Ukraine in the Eastern Partnership and ASEAN-China contestation of the Code of Conduct in the South China Sea.