Neither an EU, nor a zombie: Black Sea Economic Cooperation’s projectized regionalism under the Ukraine shocks

Why has the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) persisted despite repeated failure narratives? Existing assessments evaluate BSEC against EU-inspired regional economic integration (REI) models, conflating integration with cooperation and producing an unduly pessimistic reading. This article calls into question that practice, arguing that BSEC is better understood as projectized regionalism: a low-delegation form of cooperation coordinating corridor-oriented outputs when market-making law remains unavailable. Central to the argument is the distinction between codes (binding market-making rules) and corridors (practical channels of exchange that persist even when rule-heavy functions migrate elsewhere). Document-based analysis of the 2014 and 2022–2025 Ukraine shocks confirms that BSEC functions as positive cooperation without negative integration — an orchestrator of corridors, not a failed architect of codes – and suggests that projectized regionalism is a portable category wherever sovereignty constraints foreclose market-making integration but corridor coordination remains necessary.