In an increasingly turbulent world, marked by geopolitical instability, climate change, and deepening political polarization, postsocialist countries in what we call the Global East offer crucial insights into navigating societal transformation processes and building resilience. Modernisation discourse has long positioned postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union as lagging behind the West in economic and political progress. This session challenges this discourse of “catch-up” development and instead presents the Global East as a region rich in practices and experiences that can inspire future transformations towards a more sustainable and equitable world.

The session will bring together interdisciplinary contributions that critically explore the transformative pathways undertaken in the Global East throughout the region’s heterogenous past and present. By examining the diverse socio-economic arrangements – which include a long history of cooperatives and solidarity economies alongside oppressive state-socialism and current varieties of neoliberal capitalism – we aim to uncover how people in these regions have negotiated their place in an ever-shifting global order. Particular attention will be paid to manifold skills and practices people mobilise in response to various societal crises, which offer building blocks for transformative worldvisions.

We invite contributors to reflect on the East-West dynamic in a more balanced and nuanced way, moving beyond the traditional binaries of underdevelopment and modernization and exploring the rich heritage of community economies on the ground. This session calls for a reciprocal dialogue to make use of untapped potential of the lessons-learned in the Global East – be it widespread practices of socio-economic resilience, (painful) experiences with societal transformation processes or living a simple yet ‘good life’ of sufficiency and quiet sustainability.

What can the West learn from the successes and failures of the postsocialist East? How have people in the Global East reimagined their own futures in ways that defy Western-centric paradigms of progress? And in what ways can a decolonial reassessment of the East-West relationship foster pathways towards a more equitable and sustainable common future? We hope that these questions will contribute to plural and inclusive worldvisions to shape future transformation processes in the Global East and elsewhere.