What Now, Russologists?
Russia’s war against Ukraine has enormous consequences. First and foremost for Ukraine, but also for Russia and its neighboring states. The war has not only changed European and Norwegian security and foreign policies, it will also have a significant impact on Norwegian research on and knowledge about Russia. The opportunities for doing research in Russia have become more limited in recent years. After February 2022, it has become impossible. At the same time, knowledge about Russia is important for Norway, which shares a border and administers critical resources in cooperation with Russia. This will continue to be the case. The question now is how this knowledge is to be created given that the framework conditions under which Norwegian research on Russia has been produced during the last 30 years have dramatically changed. How are we going to update Norwegian knowledge about Russia in the coming years? What methods and data are available, and what can we expect from these?
Space, nature and hierarchy: the ecosystemic politics of the Caspian Sea
The Anthropocene has given rise to growing efforts to govern the world’s ecosystems. There is a hitch, however, ecosystems do not respect sovereign borders; hundreds traverse more three states and thus require complex international cooperation. This article critically examines the political and social consequences of the growing but understudied trend towards transboundary ecosystem cooperation. Matchmaking the new hierarchy scholarship in International Relations (IR) and political geography, the article theorises how ecosystem discourse embodies a latent spatially exclusive logic that can bind together and bound from outside unusual bedfellows in otherwise politically awkward spaces. The authors contend that such ‘ecosystemic politics’ can generate spatialised ‘broad hierarchies’ that cut across both Westphalian renderings of space and the latent post-colonial and/or material inequalities that have hitherto been the focus of most of the new hierarchies scholarship. Rowe and Beaumont illustrate their argument by conducting a multilevel longitudinal analysis of how Caspian Sea environmental cooperation has produced a broad hierarchy demarking and sharpening the boundaries of the region, become symbolic of Caspian in-group competence and neighbourliness, and used as a rationale for future Caspian-shaped cooperation. They reason that if ecosystemic politics can generate new renderings of space amid an otherwise heavily contested space as the Caspian, further research is warranted to explore systemic hierarchical consequences elsewhere.
PODCAST: Putin’s potential headache: The anti-mobilization protests in North Caucasus
The Mighty West, Two Empires, and the Lost Glory of Caucasus: Foreign Policy Visions in President Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s Rhetoric
This article systematically analyses the foreign policy visions of the first President of Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Specifically, it looks at the perceptions and representations of the external space - the world, Russia/Soviet Union, West/Europe, and Caucasus - and Georgia’s role vis-à-vis these focus areas in Gamsakhurdia’s rhetoric. Using the interpretive-explanatory method of inquiry, the article scrutinises 267 statements, letters, interviews, programs, and political speeches of Gamsakhurdia, covering the period from November 1990 to December 1993. Textual analysis takes place at two levels; the article identifies recurring themes and meanings pertaining to the four focus areas and traces how and why these themes and meanings change over time. The findings show two gaps in the scholarly literature; the article challenges the predominant position that Gamsakhurdia’s stance on Moscow was overly antagonistic, and that his rhetoric was heavily informed by religious readings of international politics. The article also shows that Gamsakhurdia’s portrayal of Georgia is of a besieged country – of a country that is trapped in the Soviet Union and that is trying to end its isolation by seeking alliances abroad – first in the West and then in Caucasus.
Post Post-Sovjet, stil og opprør: Symbolikk og subversiv nasjonalisme i Gosja Rubtsjinskijs «nye Russland»
This article explores the resonance enjoyed by streetwear designer Gosha Rubchinskiy among young Russians, and the extensive network that has emerged under his wings and refers to itself as ‘the new Russia’. Analysis of Rubchinskiy’s work, with Dick Hebdige’s semiotic approach as the epistemological context, supplemented by insights from Simon Reynolds, Michel Foucault and Michel Maffesoli, reveals a continuous deconstruction of the Russian regime’s hegemonic narrative of Russianness – so-called ‘Putinism’. At the same time, Rubchinskiy constructs a countercultural form of Russian national belonging, one with room to accommodate those who feel alienated by mainstream Russian national- ism. From a social science perspective, a countercultural inclusive nation-building project is in itself a paradox – so how are we to understand Gosha Rubchinskiy’s ‘new Russia’?
COVspiracy? COVID-19 conspiracy theories in Putin’s Russia
For years the Kremlin has been promoting conspiracy theories to legitimize its actions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the regime itself became the target of such theories.
How Russian press describes Ukrainian refugees
PODCAST: Abkhazia between Russia and the outside world
Russia’s New ‘War Nationalism’: How Nationalist Rhetoric Prepared the Ground for the Invasion of Ukraine
Ahead of Russia’s war on Ukraine, various nationalist tropes have gradually been incorporated into Russian official rhetoric. What can studying the regime’s emergent ‘war nationalism’ tell us about the identity dimension of the current conflict?
Siri Strand
Siri Strand is a visiting research fellow at NUPI’s Centre for digitalisation and cyber security studies and a member of the Research Group on Sec...