Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has emboldened policy and scholarly calls for a more geopolitical and security-conscious EU: accordingly, the EU should increase its military capabilities and assert itself as a stronger security actor against mischievous Others, namely Russia. Departing from this view, this project proposes to interrogate the EU’s ‘geopolitical turn’ by studying how it affects the (in)security of people in three Eastern borderlands. Most EU studies literature, even the critical one, has remained EU-centric, elitist and disembodied. To counter these perspectives, the project adopts a decolonial feminist and bottom-up approach to explore how the ongoing confrontation between the EU and Russia translates into everyday (in)security in Latvia (Baltics, EU member state), Georgia (Black Sea/South Caucasus, potential EU candidate country) and Armenia (South Caucasus, Eastern partner). To do so, the project centres the people at the sharp end of the EU’s geopolitical engagements, notably women and other marginalised communities. It has three objectives: first, to unpack how the EU understands whose security is worth protecting and who is seen as a threat; second, to examine how EU (in)security practices are reproduced, negotiated and contested in the borderlands, and their differential impact on people on the ground; and third, to study how people in the borderlands create and/or imagine alternative securities that challenge hegemonic geopolitical logics.