This book provides a broad geopolitical and legal analysis of the longer-term dispute between the Belarusian regime and the European Union, played out through conflict on the Polish–Belarusian border, which started in 2021. Although Poland finds itself at the center of this conflict, the book covers all countries whose territorial integrity has been affected, revealing a Belarusian regime taking advantage of the refugee crisis as a tool of hybrid warfare for destabilizing the political situation.

As such, it also examines the role of Russia and its influence by means of its Belarusian neighbor, exposing the underlying motivations and mechanisms used by the Lukashenko regime towards the European community. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of Central and Eastern European politics, EU politics, migration politics/studies, global governance, human rights, crisis management and, more broadly, to international relations, security studies, and international law.

Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at www. taylorfrancis.

com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Licence (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4. 0 license.

. .