Popular Geopolitics in Russia and Post-Soviet Eastern Europe

In line with journal editorial policy, this collection uses: Ukrainian-language transliterations for modern Ukrainian place-names; Russian-language transliterations for historical place-names within the Russian empire/Soviet Union; Russian-language transliterations (Donetsk and Lugansk) rather than Ukrainian transliterations (Donets’k and Luhans'k) in the names of the Russian-backed separatist ‘people’s republics’.

Popular geopolitics refers to a subfield of Human Geography concerned with peoples’ perceptions of different parts of the world and how those perceptions are (re)produced in popular culture. It addresses how certain representations of international politics are embedded and promulgated in mass media, including cartoons, comics, movies, video games, newspapers and magazines. Audience engagements with geopolitical narratives in the media are part of this focus of study.

The subfield of popular geopolitics originated in the early 1990s with work on Anglophone media and culture (Sharp 1993, 1996; Dodds 1994, 1996). Until recently, it was relatively rare to see the conceptual apparatus of popular geopolitics applied in relation to the post-Soviet region. Yet the concerns of popular geopolitics are highly relevant in contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe. Popular perceptions of an idealised ‘Europe’ were salient in Ukraine’s 2013–2014 ‘revolution of dignity’, for example.¹ Meanwhile, popular mistrust of ‘the West’ has become a defining feature of political life in Putin’s Russia, where it is encouraged and amplified via state television and numerous other media platforms (Smyth & Soboleva 2014; Szostek 2016).

A workshop on ‘Popular geopolitics in Russia and post-Soviet Eastern Europe’ was organised on 19–20 February 2015 at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), funded by the UCL Centre for Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Projects (CHIRP), the UCL European Institute, the Centre for East European Language-Based Area Studies (CEELBAS) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The aim was to create a forum for interdisciplinary dialogue between established scholars of popular geopolitics and area specialists who study the media, politics, societies and cultures of the former Soviet Union. The workshop was an opportunity to advance knowledge about geopolitical narratives and their circulation in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, while also broadening the geographic and linguistic scope of popular geopolitics as a subfield of enquiry. A diverse but complementary set of papers generated from the workshop constitute the basis of the present special section.

Interdisciplinary dialogue can generate fresh insights when knowledge, theories and concepts from different research traditions are combined productively. Yet interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation also implies a degree of re-thinking vis-à-vis established approaches and frameworks. Before outlining the contributions of the special section, this introductory essay therefore reflects on challenges that arise at the intersection of popular geopolitics and Russian and East European area studies. It specifically highlights the problem of accessing ‘the popular’ in authoritarian political/media environments, and the need to build on insights from both interpretivist and positivist research.

Locating the ‘popular’ in popular geopolitics

‘Popular’ geopolitics is one of three ‘forms’ of geopolitical culture (Ciută & Klinke 2010) that is contrasted heuristically against ‘practical’ geopolitics and ‘formal’ geopolitics (Ó Tuathail 1999) The distinction between popular, practical, and formal geopolitics is usually expressed in terms of the type of agent involved in reproducing geopolitical discourse (respectively: publics, policy practitioners, intellectuals) and the type of forum where the discourse occurs (respectively: mass media, policy practice, academia and think tanks) The permeability of the three forms is acknowledged and the question of how best to delineate and locate the ‘popular’ is a matter of ongoing debate (Ciută & Klinke 2010; Pinkerton & Benwell 2014).

Popular geopolitics deals with ‘the social construction and perpetuation’ of collective understandings of places and peoples (Ó Tuathail 1999, p. 110). Scholars regularly proceed from the notion that popular geopolitics can be ‘found’ within mass media of various types (Dittmer & Dodds 2008, p. 441). Two distinct but usually tacit premises underlie this notion (Ciută & Klinke 2010). The first is that geographical representations in media discourse ‘produce’ geographical imaginations amongst media users. The second is that geographical representations in media discourse are a ‘mirror’ of geographical imaginations among media users. The two premises suggest different kinds of ‘popularity’. The first premise reads media discourse as popular because it is widely disseminated (‘for the populace’); the second reads media discourse as popular because it is widely accepted (‘of the populace’). Ciută and Klinke (2010) note that these premises are rarely made explicit in the literature, which renders the implications of popular geopolitics studies based entirely on media discourse rather ambiguous.

Both these premises become problematic if they are adopted without scrutiny. The first risks equating geographical representations in the media with the thinking of media consumers, thereby neglecting individual agency and variation in responses to media discourse. The second premise is questionable in situations where media producers have little autonomy from state officials. In authoritarian or hybrid regimes, media producers may transmit narratives developed by the political leadership, following regular and explicit instructions. Discourse in such media is likely to reflect the immediate interests of powerholders in the first instance, before it mirrors anything at the public level.

The assumption that media discourse is a manifestation of ‘the popular’ simply by virtue of its presence in mass media has raised questions even in democratic contexts. With the development of online communication, Pinkerton and Benwall point out that ‘academics and think tank analysts (the supposed keepers of formal geopolitical knowledge), politicians/diplomats (the keepers of practical geopolitical discourses) and the media (the producers of popular geopolitical knowledge) are now integrated into a much more interactive ecosystem of geopolitical knowledge exchange’ (Pinkerton & Benwall 2014, p. 13).

In non-democratic contexts, the established understanding of popular geopolitics is destabilised further by the fact that academics, think tanks, politicians, diplomats and the media may all be different branches of the same state machine. In Russia, for instance, state officials guide the activities of academics (Saprykina 2015) and heavily influence the work of media professionals in journalism and across the creative industries (Zaitseva 2008). Russian state money even pays for commenters (otherwise known as ‘trolls’) to ensure that state-directed narratives are present in internet discussions, blogs and forums (Garmazhapova 2013).

The original ambition of popular geopolitics was to explore ‘locations of discursive production which lie outside the formal arena of the state and those so-called intellectuals of statecraft’ (Dodds 1996, p. 575). But mass media are not necessarily locations ‘outside the formal arena of the state’; designating them as such suggests a rather Western-centric outlook. Some time ago, ‘mainly Anglophone political geographers’ were encouraged to ‘further connect up with other scholars in the non-West in order to ensure that this subfield develops beyond its comfortable seats/sites’—but this remark was made in a footnote, after prompting from a reviewer (Dittmer & Dodds 2008, p. 455). The lack of urgency in this regard is unfortunate, because the central questions of popular geopolitics—how collective visions of threatening others are mobilised, reified or challenged, how alternative representations of global politics are interpreted—are no less interesting or pressing in China, Iran or Russia than they are in the United States, the United Kingdom or Australia. If researchers are to engage effectively with popular geopolitics beyond democratic contexts, they require an analytical approach that incorporates media discourse but does not rely on it exclusively.

Popular geopolitics at the interface between media and publics

How, then, should the study of popular geopolitics be approached in environments where many of the most widely-consumed mass media are state-run or state-directed? One option is to seek out media production where state interference is the least heavy. For example, social media are sites where non-elites perform geopolitics (Suslov 2015); they might be ‘infiltrated’ by state voices but they cannot be entirely directed from above. Yet online discourse is only one piece in the puzzle; other empirical evidence bases should not be neglected.

Gearóid Ó Tuathail (2003, p. 85) suggests that public opinion surveys can be studied in addition to media and cultural products to assess the dimensions of popular geopolitical culture. During the 2000s, a series of articles based on representative surveys were published about popular ‘geopolitical imaginations’ in Russia (O’Loughlin 2001; O’Loughlin et al. 2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2006; O’Loughlin & Talbot 2005). The authors defined popular geopolitical imaginations as ‘the prevalent images, conceptualizations, and discourses in popular culture and among the general population of where that state is positioned and located within the world’s community of states’ (O’Loughlin et al. 2006, p. 131). They operationalised and measured these imaginations empirically by asking survey questions like: ‘Is Russia a European or Asian country?’; ‘What countries are important to our state?’; and ‘What countries are models for our state?’ (O’Loughlin et al. 2006, p. 130).

Surveys provide valuable information about the contours of public opinion but they also have limitations. Closed-ended questions may say as much about the researchers’ thinking as about the thinking of the research subjects. Imaginations are rich, integrating emotions, complex narratives and ambiguous signifiers. If surveys try to measure them in half a dozen brief questions, much is inevitably missed. Surveys also tend to generate snapshots of popular geopolitical imaginations at particular moments. The problem with snapshots is that they shed little light on the processes through which those imaginations change or endure over time. Survey analysis ‘explains’ variation in opinion in terms of socio-demographic variables—age, place of residence, level of education and so on. But most socio-demographic variables are not explanations in their own right. In Russia, for example, different ages may correlate with different survey responses about the West but age per se is unlikely to account for attitudinal variation. Rather, age matters because different age cohorts were taught different things in school, or recall different international events, or rely on different sources of news.

Given the limitations of analysing media discourse or surveys in isolation, a methodologically eclectic approach that combines multiple forms of evidence (media discourse, surveys, various kinds of interviews and ethnographic observations) is likely to be the most promising route to understanding how collective geopolitical meaning is made in Russia and Eastern Europe. Greater attention needs to be focused on how and why individuals come to consume particular geopolitical narratives via the media, and how and why they respond to what they see. Media use and questions of media reception in the post-Soviet states have not often been systematically investigated by academics. The main exceptions are limited to Russia and deal primarily with the reception of messages about domestic politics, not the wider world (Mickiewicz 2005, 2008; Oates 2006; Toepfl 2013, 2014). Rising internet access is giving more and more citizens throughout the post-Soviet states the opportunity to access diverse, contradictory geopolitical narratives. Examining how and why these geopolitical narratives are consumed, ignored, internalised, contradicted or reproduced is a pressing research challenge.

It should be noted that the ‘Anglophone’ popular geopolitics literature has been dominated to date by scholars who favour an interpretivist epistemology. Popular geopolitics developed within critical geopolitics, which aims to expose, question and subvert ‘taken-for-granted geographical reasoning’ (Dittmer & Dodds 2008, p. 441) rather than to investigate causal processes. Critical geopolitics ‘begins from the argument that geopolitics is inevitably an interpretative and not an objective practice’ (O’Loughlin et al. 2004a, p. 5). Grayson et al. (2009, p. 156) say this interpretivist perspective is merited because the ‘“cause-and-effect” demands of positivism’ necessitate a categorical separation between politics and popular culture, which obscures culture’s importance in a ‘complex continuum’ between prevailing discourses and action. Their point relates particularly to popular culture’s influence on formal sites of international relations (institutions, interests, decision-making), which they see as constitutive rather than demonstrably causal.

The interpretivist emphasis on unravelling patterns of subjective understanding is often considered antithetical to positivism’s insistence that ‘the only legitimate question that social scientists can ask is the causal question of “why?”’ (Wendt 1999, p. 85).² However, interpretivist and positivist approaches can be complementary. For Wendt, positivism and interpretivism are associated, respectively, with causal and constitutive theories that ‘simply ask different questions’, none less valid than the other (Wendt 1999, p. 78). Hollis and Smith similarly make room for the two traditions by pointing out that people ‘interpret, filter and assess; they perceive and misperceive. Their perceptions are not completely determined, but this does not mean that perceptions are not caused … perceptions are best understood as conditioned to a large extent’ (Hollis & Smith 1991, p. 206).

With ‘information war’, ‘psychological operations’ and ‘post-truth politics’ on the front pages, observers of the post-Soviet region are increasingly raising causal questions about the media’s impact on audiences. They are interested in assessing the negative ‘effects’ of state-sponsored propaganda, partly because they would like to know how such effects might be counteracted. Some of these area specialists might therefore be frustrated by the avoidance of ‘cause-and-effect’ questions in interpretivist popular geopolitics scholarship. However, engagement with ideas from the interpretivist school of thought could improve the quality of debate about media, propaganda and public opinion in the post-Soviet region. Too frequently, mass post-Soviet audiences are discussed in simplistic terms as mere respondents to media stimuli, whose understanding of the world will fall into alignment with whichever ‘side’ adopts the savviest or most energetic communication policy. The interpretivist perspective, in contrast, would have us recognise that ‘meanings are negotiated between text and reader rather than imposed by the former and submitted to or deflected by the latter’ (Livingstone 1993, p. 7). It would have us devote time and effort to documenting nuances and ambiguities in citizens’ geopolitical imaginations, rather than just calculating which elite-sponsored messages are securing the biggest returns. This is not to say that responses to elite-sponsored messages are unimportant, nor that geopolitical imaginations cannot be ‘operationalised’ into variables that are affected by media consumption and other factors. Rather, positivist research should be sensitive to the fact that the production of geopolitical meaning is more than a matter of stimulus–response, and that overreliance on quantifiable variables might obscure important complexities of storylines in which popular understandings of geography are embedded.

The special section contributions

The six research essays in this collection draw on a wide range of evidence to document geopolitical narratives and their circulation in various parts of post-Soviet Eastern Europe—and beyond. The special section begins in Ukraine, with Mikhail Suslov’s analysis of how the idea of ‘Novorossiya’ has been discussed, contextualised and understood on social networks. Suslov argues that indeterminate territorial parameters ultimately prevented ‘Novorossiya’ from becoming a geopolitical ‘brand’ that might have distinguished its land and people from the lands and peoples to either side. Dariya Orlova’s essay then presents critical discourse analysis of popular Ukrainian talk shows, focusing on references to the idea of ‘Europe’. Her work demonstrates how ‘Europe’ and ‘European’ became rhetorical markers of quality and advancement across a wide range of contexts in the years preceding ‘Euromaidan’. Despite polarisation in discussions about foreign policy, politicians from across the Ukrainian political spectrum frequently referred to Europe as the home of best practices, democratic values and great welfare. This rendered the desirability of destination Europe ‘commonsensical’.

The third essay, by Nelly Bekus, considers the construction of Poland and ‘Polishness’ in Belarusian cultural production. Her analysis encompasses TV programmes, film, novels and theatre performances, in which Poland’s ‘otherness’ vis-à-vis Belarus is sometimes sustained, but sometimes overcome in a way that makes space for Belarus in Europe. The contested image of Polishness in Belarusian discourse reflects both historical and contemporary tensions and Bekus argues that no vision has yet become dominant.

In the latter half of the special section, attention moves to Russia. Two contributions focus on perceptions of international politics among Russian university students. Valeria Kasamara and Anna Sorokina present rich empirical evidence of geopolitical visions amongst a student cohort, focusing on the results of over 130 individual interviews. The authors demonstrate a strong link between confidence in Russia’s prospects as a ‘great power’ and support for Crimea’s annexation. They trace narratives which students used to ‘justify’ Russian actions in Crimea, many of which relate to Russia’s perpetual ‘need’ to stand up to the ‘hostile West’. The following essay, by Joanna Szostek, adopts a more quantitative approach to studying geopolitical imaginations amongst students. Her analysis of original survey data demonstrates that students tend to hold particularly negative views of the West when they use state-aligned news sources—but it also reveals that there is support for many ‘anti-Western’ ideas even among students who avoid state-controlled media and follow the news via more independent outlets.

Finally, Robert Saunders and Vlad Strukov urge us to think beyond the paradigm of Russia against the West. In their essay, they propose a framework for studying Russian popular culture’s contribution to ‘everyday’ geopolitical understanding, based on the concept of ‘feedback loops’. Feedback loops define systems of exchange and iteration, which influence in turn perceptions of the world as a geopolitical space. The authors discuss four case studies in which currents of Russian and Western popular culture feed off and into each other—the cinematic projects of director Timur Bekmambetov, adaptations of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, the Masyanya animation and the popular video game Metro 2033.

In sum, the contributions to this special section demonstrate how important questions of ‘popular geopolitics’ can be tackled using diverse methods and approaches from multiple disciplines. It is hoped that these essays will inspire further cross-disciplinary dialogue and research into popular geopolitical imaginations in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Notes

In line with journal editorial policy, this collection uses: Ukrainian-language transliterations for modern Ukrainian place-names; Russian-language transliterations for historical place-names within the Russian empire/Soviet Union; Russian-language transliterations (Donetsk and Lugansk) rather than Ukrainian transliterations (Donets’k and Luhans'k) in the names of the Russian-backed separatist ‘people’s republics’.

¹ See Orlova in this collection.

² See also Wendt (1999, p. 48), Roth and Mehta (2002).