Russian – Norwegian Borderlands: Three Facets of Geopolitics

ABSTRACT

This article aims to explore a paradoxical co-existence of various forms and models of trans-border interactions in areas of direct adjacency of Norway and Russia. Our main hypothesis is that the structural conditions of securitization that became dominant in NATO-Russia relations after the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas produce different effects all across the borderline, directly affecting borderland communities, including mobility, connectivity and public security. As our key point, we posit that the geopolitical conflictuality and the ensuing gaps and ruptures in military security are not automatically projected onto the level of “low” / grass-roots / local politics where there exists a public demand for expanding the existing spaces of interaction in such fields as cultural exchanges, environmental protection and people-to-people contacts. Apparently, the geopolitical divides are more visible and easily identifiable through the mainstream media, while other layers need a different optics allowing to spot various regimes of border functioning and peer into the complex construction of borders, where geopolitical divisions and partitions are counter-balanced by sub-national activities and initiatives discarding the logic of geopolitical conflict and alternating it with the grass-roots public / cultural diplomacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Structural geopolitics
• practical geopolitics
• popular geopolitics
• geopoetics
• biopolitics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The name comes from one of Edvard Munch’s paintings.

2 A similar procedure of issuing the permissions or certificates for visa-free travel was used by Russian (Kaliningrad region) and Polish authorities but the process was suspended by Poland in 2014; Russia and Latvia have an agreement according to which the pre-border areas transfer each other the lists of their residents which allows to have the similar “visa-free regime”.

3 List of respondents:

Erik Svedahl, Consul General of Norway to Russia,

Sergey Shatunovsky-Burno, Consul General of Russia to Norway,

Svetlana Soldatova, Director of the Film festival “Northern Character” (Murmansk)

Inna Fyodorova, art group FridayMilk (Murmansk)

Mikhail Krotov, Barents Regional Youth Council (Finnmark region representative)

Margrethe Alnes, Advisor and grant coordinator at the Norwegian Barents Secretariat (Kirkenes)

Alexandra Kremenets, Manager of the Art-residency of Vtoraya shkola (Nikel)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Estonian Ministry of Education and Research: [Grant Number IUT20-39].