Resilience is a widespread concept and a key priority for the EU. We focus on resilience’s relations with stability. These notions have been subject to ongoing theoretical debate and have not been clearly separated in EU discourses. We explore how resilience and stability have been used regarding the Southern and Eastern dimensions of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and suggest how their different meanings may be better distinguished and conceptualised. Resilience has penetrated the ENP’s discourses unevenly and attracted the limited interest of the neighbours. Besides, the EU’s policies will likely face numerous practical problems mostly similar to the ENP’s both dimensions. The EU’s policies themselves have disturbed stability in its neighbourhood, and now, even restoring the old stability would be problematic, let alone attaining a more positive one. Furthermore, the EU could impose its views regarding stability and/or resilience. Also, Brussels could de facto uphold negative stability and/or resilience.

Although influential in philosophy and relevant to international political theory’s (IPT) key concerns, Donald Davidson has not received commensurate attention in IPT. I aim here to commence filling this gap. I explore Davidson’s insights which fruitfully challenge established disciplinary views. The notions of rationality, objectivity and truth, and, on the other hand, those of intersubjectivity, language and interpretation are often needlessly separated and constricted by seemingly alternative approaches. Davidson firmly reconnects these notions. He helps rethink the realist, strong post-positivist, but also liberal, ‘thin’ constructivist and critical (not thoroughly contextualist) approaches. He bridges the normative cosmopolitan–communitarian distinction. Eventually, Davidson laid foundations for a perspective foregrounding possibilities for rational communication and agreement between very different contexts and also for the non-dogmatic, pluralist and dynamic nature of communication itself.

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The article reviews the experience of the role-play simulation (RPS) 'Modelling negotiations between the EU and EAEU', arranged in 2018 and 2019. Its specific goals were building knowledge (about the European Union (EU) and Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and enhancing a transnational dialogue between EU (Western) and Russian students in the context of a deteriorated EU-Russian relationship. This latter aspect of international RPS has received insufficient attention in the literature, yet it might contribute to the improvement of real-life EU-Russian relations through fostering a transnational dialogue and mutual understanding among young citizens. The article outlines the setting of the RPS and addresses three major difficulties that the organisers faced (designing the RPS, preparing students and fostering their dialogue), the solutions that were developed and the assessments of the results. Keywords Role-play simulation; Modelling; EU-Russian relations; Eurasian Economic Union; Free trade area; Transnational dialogueRole-play simulations (RPS) have been widely practised since the second half of the twentieth century. They model the work of a state, an international organisation (or their institutions), in limited time and space and, based on scripts and role descriptions that are close to the rules and procedures, practised in real life. This article focuses on the simulation of negotiations between the European Union (EU) and Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) that took place in 2018 and 2019 at Saint Petersburg State University. It pursued two goals: 1) to enhance students' knowledge of the EU, EAEU and their relations (in particular prospects for a free trade area between them); and 2) to stimulate a transnational dialogue through building contacts among Russian and EU (Western) students and developing relevant transferable skills. The article first reviews the literature on RPS; it then explains the context in which this RPS was prepared, its goals and setting. Next, it outlines how organisers dealt with three major difficulties, which are: designing the RPS; ensuring that students are prepared; and enhancing the transnational dialogue and ultimately building trust at the societal level. Finally, the article looks at how the results of the simulation were assessed (including the solutions adopted for the difficulties that were identified). APPROACHES TO RPSThe existing literature offers three approaches to RPS, which can be identified as academic, educational and mixed. According to the first one, RPS is a tool of analysis that, through simplifying real processes, allows for a focusing on their most significant aspects and on forecasting future developments. Historically, this is the first approach to RPS, which dates back to studies of biological logics in social organisation through observing the animal world (Tolman 1948) and to studies in modern behavioural psychology (Watson 1913;Thorndike 1905). At a later stage, econometric logic ENDNOTES 1 The team initially consisted of three scholars from the Departmen...