‘It is Krajina all over again’: geopolitics of spite and geographical analogy in a Serbian newspaper audience

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the negotiation of geopolitical knowledge by internet audiences in the comment section of the website of the Serbian newspaper Politika. It maps changes in the commenters’ attitudes towards Russia’s declarative role as the international protector of Serbia’s territorial sovereignty through an examination of online comments on the Russo-Georgian war in 2008 and Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. Starting with Serbia’s international humiliation during the Yugoslav wars, exemplified by the exodus from the Republic of Serbian Krajina in 1995 and the Kosovo crisis of 1999, it analyses the strategies that users deploy to draw geographical analogies between distant and local places and across time. The example of this Serbian newspaper comment board is used to discuss the benefits of deeper engagement with online comments in geopolitical narrative and argue for the value of treating geographical analogies as expressions of emotion. The sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD) is shown to be useful in popular geopolitical analysis, especially of the knowledge/emotion nexus. SKAD is used to propose a context-specific way of accessing emotions in geopolitical narratives, taking the case of what is traditionally regarded as a national character trait in Serbia – inat, or ‘spite, defiance’.

KEYWORDS:

• online comments
• geographical analogy
• Serbia
• Russia
• social knowledge
• inat

INTRODUCTION

Those who are able and willing to read between the lines will definitely be able to understand the Ukrainian crisis. History is repeating itself. We live in times of technocracy, when a scenario already seen can be lived through again.¹

Media audiences create geopolitical knowledge through the interplay of established elements of geopolitical thinking – ‘truths’ circulating within the media and public sphere – with emotional responses to the perceived international world order and their country’s position in the world of states. I analyse this knowledge/emotion nexus, zooming in on the ways audiences express their emotional investments through geographical and historical analogy in the comment board of Politika, the most respected Serbian broadsheet. Specifically, I address the discussion of two internationally significant and emotion-inducing political events: the Russo-Georgian war in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

In this paper, I argue for treating geographical analogies as expressions of geopolitical emotion and demonstrate the value of using online comments in critical geopolitical analyses. First, I present the relevance of Russia’ policies in the Caucasus for the Serbian media audiences and connect their perceptions to the memory of Serbia’s international humiliation in the 1990s. Next, I discuss my theoretical framework in which I combine ‘interpretative analytics’ in the tradition of the new sociology of knowledge (Keller, 2011, 2012) with existing research on the role of emotion in (geo)politics (Crawford, 2000; Mercer, 2006; Pain, 2009). I use this to show how examining online comments as hybrids of the public and the everyday helps break down and refocus scales of geopolitical analyses (global/local; public/private; practical/formal/popular) which may not reflect the complex reality (cf. Ó Tuathail, 1999; Thien, 2005). Considering online comments as users’ participatory engagement with geopolitics is one way of accessing the everyday dimension of geopolitics postulated by Dittmer and Gray (2010). Previous research (e.g., Dittmer & Parr, 2011; Măgurean, 2017; Petsinis, 2016; Savić, 2014; Subotić, 2016) has concentrated on elite (practical geopolitics), media (popular) and academic (formal geopolitics) reasoning in Serbia and beyond in relation to Kosovo/South Ossetia and Abkhazia (on social levels of geopolitics, see Ó Tuathail, 1999). In contrast to this research, I ask how a particular geopolitical ‘knowledge’ is formed in the online communication of ‘ordinary readers’.

In the method section, I show how the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD) can be used to access the knowledges and emotions on the comment board. In the analysis section, I turn to the commenters’ use of geographical analogies to convey emotions arising from their perceptions of international humiliation, using a specific sociocultural ‘key’ – the notion of Serbian inat, or ‘defiance, spite’. I show how users’ practices of analogizing underlie their understanding of both Serbia’s positioning in global geopolitics and the nature of geopolitics itself. I conclude by assessing the emotional dynamics of humiliation and spite and showing how it influences knowledge negotiation on the comment board.

For the purposes of this analysis, the comment board of Politika is understood as a ‘communication laboratory’ where readers test an old ‘geopolitical truth’ – Serbian–Russian friendship and the brotherly bond between the two nations – against Russia’s contemporary contradictory international behaviour, which bears significant implications for its alleged unconditional support for Serbia.

Overall, I address two key questions: How do traditionally pro-Russian Serbian public opinion and Politika’s reading audience make sense of the widely alleged ‘double standard’ in Russia’s treatment of the Balkans and the Caucasus? What elements of ‘gut geopolitical feelings’ underpin the knowledge that emerges in users’ communication on the comment board and how do commenters structure and order this knowledge?

POLITICAL BACKGROUND

On 17 February 2008, Kosovo – a Serbian province with an Albanian ethnic majority and an international protectorate since 1999 – declared independence. The United States and the majority of European Union (EU) states² supported Kosovo’s independence, despite the ‘sacrosanctity’ of European borders after the Second World War.

In contrast to the West, Russia has been the most vocal defender of Serbian territorial integrity since the internationalization of the Serbian–Albanian conflict in the 1990s. Traditionally, Russia enjoys the status of a ‘brother’ nation and historical protector in Serbia due to longstanding ties between the two countries, although in practice Serbian–Russian relations have been multilayered and subject to much political mythologizing (Jovanović, 2012). The Russian foreign policy discourse on Kosovo is permeated by appeals to the authority of international law and the principle of the national sovereignty of states. The West is accused of upholding this principle only when and where its own interests justify it, that is, of having a double standard. Arguably, the events around Kosovo since 1999 have markedly influenced Russia’s own foreign policy (Hopf, 2002, p. 253; Morozov, 2009, p. 429).

Despite its diplomatic support for Serbian territorial integrity, Russia recognized the independence of two Georgian de facto states that have often been compared with Kosovo – Abkhazia and South Ossetia – following a five-day Russo-Georgian war only six months after Kosovo declared independence. This act added two new entities to the ‘parade of sovereignties’ Russia warned the West about with respect to Kosovo. At the same time, it created a dissonance between Russia’s declarative commitment to uphold the territorial integrity of states (for Serbia) and active undermining of this integrity (in Georgia).

This dissonance was noticed and debated in Serbian media, especially against the background of Russia’s rise as a protector power after February 2008 (Petrović, 2010, p. 26). Political analysts, journalists and pundits speculated whether Russian recognition of Kosovo would follow and how Serbia should position itself in the chaotically developing international situation. The fact that Russia now seemed to be holding two contradictory views on states’ recognition was thematized, which led to debates on the sincerity of Russian support for Serbia versus its possible self-interest. The debates largely followed the divide between conservative pro-Russian and ‘liberal’ pro-Western positions, a political cleavage present in Serbia since the nineteenth century and updated periodically to fit (geo)political circumstances (Jovanović, 2010, 2012; Russel-Omaljev, 2016).

The contradictions or even ‘double standards’ in Russian policies towards Kosovo/Serbia and Abkhazia, South Ossetia/Georgia have been discussed repeatedly ever since. Debates about the ‘sincerity’ of Russia’s pro-Serbian engagement resurfaced again in 2014, after Crimea’s declaration of independence and then annexation by Russia in March 2014. Serbian diplomacy did not take a clear position on either of the events, limiting itself to general declarations of ‘respect for international law and principled commitment to the maintenance of sovereignty and territorial integrity of all internationally recognized states’ and ‘concern about the development of events in the Caucasus’ (Moguće zamrzavanje, 2008).

Interestingly, Serbian public support for Russia did not wane after Russia’s recognition of Georgia’s de facto republics in 2008 or annexation of Crimea in 2014, despite the potential of such moves to undermine Russia’s status as a pro-Serbian international player defending the principles of territorial integrity. Representative public opinion surveys showed Vladimir Putin as the most popular foreign politician in Serbia in 2009, followed immediately by Dmitry Medvedev (Agencija Politikum, 2009). In October 2014, Putin was still the most popular foreign leader with 74.8% of respondents finding him trustworthy, whereas 70.1% of the surveyed representative sample supported a Serbian alliance with Russia (NSPM, 2014).

How was the majority pro-Russian public opinion in Serbia able to make sense of the alleged ‘double standard’ in Russia’s treatment of the Balkans and the Caucasus and still see Russia as ‘protector’ and ‘brother’? The silence of Serbian diplomats in both 2008 and 2014 speaks to uneasiness with Russia’s international behaviour among the Serbian political elite (‘practical geopoliticians’). How, then, were ‘everyday geopoliticians’ able to uphold the traditional image of Russia as ‘brother’ on the comment board?

SERBIA’S INTERNATIONAL HUMILIATION AND INAT

One proposed explanation for both the official foreign policy of close ties with Russia and the pro-Russian popular sentiment in Serbia is the memory of international humiliation after the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s and in the Kosovo case (Bechev, 2017; Bianchini, 2011; Subotić, 2011). Among the most shocking events of Serbian humiliation was the exodus of 200,000–250,000 refugees from the separatist Republic of Serbian Krajina within newly independent Croatia in 1995 after the US-backed Operation Storm. Another humiliating event was the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The relevance of humiliation and its emotional effects in global politics has been discussed by many (Harkavy, 2000; Moïsi, 2009; Saurette, 2006), however most scholars concentrate on the responses of the state, military or politicians, ignoring the agency of media audiences.

Indeed, the humiliation-based bond between Serbia and Russia can be traced as far back as the First World War (Massie, 2011, p. 262; Scheff, 1994, p. 145). Not only did Russia undergo a similar humiliation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it was also the only international player at the time which supported Serbia’s international moves. Nowadays, the pro-Russian sections of the Serbian media often see Russia as having overcome its humiliation much better than Serbia and making a comeback in the global ‘geopolitical game’ (cf. Moïsi, 2009 on the culture of humiliation in Russia). Politika’s comment board abounds in calls to follow Russia’s example. Most research and commentary on the Serbian pro-Russian sentiment regards it as a result of Russian soft power. Yet, analysts concentrate largely on Russia’s actions, whose reception in Serbia is not thoroughly mapped, even in works that explicitly enumerate and discuss pro-Russian organizations (Đurković, 2012; Milić, 2016). However, if we are to take media audiences’ ability to negotiate meanings seriously (Dittmer & Dodds, 2008; Woon, 2014), we need a more nuanced engagement with Serbian audiences’ perceptions and interpretations of Russia: one that interrogates the most mundane ways in which people form and rationalize their ‘knowledge’ about Russia’s role in Serbia’s domestic and foreign policies.

On close reading, many commenters rejoice not so much in Russian ‘success’ in Georgia or Crimea per se, but rather in Western failure to prevent it. ‘The West has obviously never heard about the expression don’t rock the boat,’³ as one commenter put it ironically.

This attitude is deeply entrenched in Serbian culture and society, and has a name: inat. A specific cultural notion often described as not really translatable (Boinod, 2007), it can be rendered in English as spite, obstinacy or defiance. Inat constitutes an affective disposition used in Serbia to describe how the Serbian nation relates to the wider world. In Serbia, it is universally regarded as the national character trait and often considered the main motivator of political decisions and geopolitical orientations, in everyday ‘coffee talk’ and newspaper analyses alike.

In 1999, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, inat became an internationally discussed ‘Serbian phenomenon’ when the BBC ran a headline calling inat a Serbian ‘secret weapon of resilience’. The newspaper defined it as an ‘attitude of proud defiance, stubbornness, and self-preservation – sometimes to the detriment of everyone else or even oneself’ (BBC News, 1999).

I propose to access Politika’s comment board in 2008 and 2014 and expressions of inat therein as a response to Serbia’s international humiliation. Similar entrenched ‘national character’ traits or ‘national feelings’ have been used in previous critical geopolitical analyses (Howell & Sundberg, 2015; Saunders, 2017).

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: ONLINE COMMENTS, GEOGRAPHICAL ANALOGIES AND GEOPOLITICAL EMOTION

Since the ‘emotional turn’ in human geography and political sciences (Anderson & Smith, 2001; Crawford, 2000) interest in the political lives of emotions has been expanding. Research on the (geo)politics of emotions often distinguishes between affect and emotion. Affect belongs to the ‘transhuman’, pre-cognitive, and non-representable (McCormack, 2003; Thrift, 2004), whereas emotions tend to be understood as embodying the personal and intersubjective (Thien, 2005).

The differentiation between emotions and affect, and the focus on elite discourses and loosely defined collectivities (Moïsi, 2009) have been criticized as limiting (Pain, 2009; Thien, 2005). Feminist scholars point to the need to consider the actual agency of audiences and ‘ordinary people’, thus transcending the traditional scales (global/local; highbrow/everyday) which researchers use to situate their studies (Bleiker & Hutchison, 2008).

In this analysis, I take these critiques seriously and aim to respond to them in three ways.

• In my choice of data. I use online comments as empirical material, considering their transitory quality as hybrids of the personal and the public.

• In my theoretical approach. I hold that knowledge is always subjectively acquired (Schnettler et al., 2017), then negotiated and ‘applied’ in communication on a public forum, thus bridging the divide between the private and the political.

• In my analysis. I pay careful attention to the processes by which problems are constructed and geographical analogies are made on the comment board, which enables me to distil the interplay of mainstream geopolitical discourses with their actual interpretations through everyday actors.

THE VALUE OF ONLINE COMMENTS

Geopolitical analyses have used material from films (Dodds, 2013), radio (Pinkerton, 2008), newspapers and magazines (Sharp, 2000), comic books (Dittmer, 2013) and music (Dunbar-Hall & Gibson, 2000). Recently, inspired by the call for new ways of engagement with the everyday (Dittmer & Gray, 2010), studies of mundane dimensions of geopolitics began to appear. These include analyses of children’s war play (Woodyer & Carter, 2020), television viewing patterns (Glynn & Cupples, 2015), newspaper-reading (Woon, 2014), social media use and digital citizen diplomacy (Pinkerton & Benwell, 2014; Woon, 2018). Some researchers specifically examined online comments: Dodds focused on fans’ discussion boards debating James Bond films (Dittmer & Dodds, 2008; Dodds, 2006); Dittmer (2008, 2010) and Howard (2006) analysed evangelical Christian online forums.

The interest of geopolitical scholars in online comments peaked in the beginning of the 2000s and has since faded, although the comments are relevant to social research of geopolitical knowledge and emotion. In his study on internet users’ engagements in Singapore’s 2011 general election, Woon (2018) observed that the speed and brevity of social media discussions, especially on Twitter with its branching-out interface, make them difficult to follow, thereby preventing users from fully reflecting upon their positions. This is not the case on a comment board, where the clear structure showcases arguments forming and unfolding in a discussion. Comments are often much longer than tweets. Users undergo little to no self-censorship due to the anonymity of comment boards; this lack of restraint gives such platforms a ‘bad reputation’. These platforms are often dismissed as ‘the bottom half of the internet’ (Reagle, 2015, p. 3), given their potential for incivility, aggression, ‘verbal venting’, racism, and extremism (Hughey & Daniels, 2013; Roesner et al., 2016). Thus, comment boards represent the largely uncontrolled world of ‘reviewers, fan fiction authors, online learners, scammers, free thinkers, and mean kids’ (Reagle, 2015, p. 3).

Reagle (2015), demonstrated the precise value of online comments for social research by conceptualizing them as a communication genre in their own right. This genre provides insight into social problems and human communication (Swan, 2016). Although short, asynchronous and reactive (Reagle, 2015, p. 23) comments generate new knowledge due to their participatory quality, as the commenters’ thoughts are expressed to others.

Why are online comments useful to scholars of critical geopolitics? They are textual products that reproduce pre-existent geopolitical discourses of the media and foreign policy elites, but also creative audience engagements that can produce new meanings. They are generated in the intimacy of the commenters’ home or personalized smartphone interface; simultaneously, they are acts of participation in a broader social discussion. They capture emotions in a compact and largely uncensored manner. They insert the common-sense reasoning and ‘operational knowledges’ of everyday problem-solving into ‘serious’ discussions of international politics. This intermediary character and disruptive potential of online commenting was confirmed by much research into journalists’ and editors’ reactions to the comments (Nielsen, 2012; Reader, 2012). Comment boards are hybrids of the public and the everyday, where social knowledge at its most mundane – the traditional object of interest of the sociology of knowledge – meets the geopolitical realm.

Social knowledge, emotions and geographical analogy

The comments on Politika’s website exemplify how an audience equipped with shared historical experiences, interpretive repertoires (Potter & Wetherell, 1987) and often a sense of shared interest in its media engagements (Ross & Nightingale, 2003, p. 4) negotiates knowledge and structures geopolitical narratives from social stocks of knowledge available to its members. Following Berger and Luckmann (1966), I define social knowledge as a ‘sum total of “what everybody knows” about a social world, an assemblage of maxims, morals, proverbial nuggets of wisdom, values and beliefs, myths’ (p. 83). In the analysed comments, it is a sum of understandings, myths, and beliefs about Russia, Serbia, their history and connections, but also about the territories commented upon: Caucasus and Crimea.

Mediated (mediatized) knowledge, that is, knowledge formed in the context of media use, is not only a negotiation between existent shared representations and beliefs but always also a discovery of something new: not only a cultural and social habitus is at stake, but also recognition of and active engagement with the unknown (Livingstone, 1999, p. 96).

This interplay of old and new is clearly detectable in the comments on Politika’s website. Old ideas about Serbia’s victimization in world affairs in recent history and Russia’s brotherly protection of Serbia are woven together with new information about Georgia and Crimea; remote, rarely discussed regions. What emerges is a mosaic of historical and geographical analogies, contrasts, and vantage points that together create knowledge about who is the ‘brother’ and who is the ‘other’.

Given the repeated expressions of emotional engagement in the comments (sadness, happiness, satisfaction), knowledge claims cannot form the only axis for the analysis. Close attention needs to be paid to expressions of emotion. My approach to emotions in a geopolitical context is largely social constructivist: emotions are culturally and socially shared and enforced ‘grammars’, rules of word usage that qualify human actions and may include bodily agitation, evaluative cognitive judgements and dispositions to act (Averill, 1980; Harré, 2009).

As the commenters draw on historical traditions, concepts, and imaginations, I pay special attention to the cognitive component of the emotional load expressed in the comment board. In this, I share Nussbaum’s (2001, p. 3) conviction that emotions are ‘messy and highly complex parts of reasoning’ and ‘upheavals of thought’ that include moral judgements and normative prescriptions for ‘a good life’ or a morally correct state of affairs. The clearly discernible East/West divide in the comments, with these categories ascribed as good/bad, is a moral judgement and geopolitical prescription of who to ally with and why, for Serbia’s ‘international wellbeing’.

I build upon Mercer’s (2006) theorizations of emotions as essential components of beliefs and rationality itself, which ‘constitute interests and cause behaviour’ (p. 294). According to him, in social science emotions can be considered in relation to norms. As I show, this approach is fruitful in analysing people’s responses to state behaviours. In the Serbian post-conflict situation, grave violations of social and political norms are fresh in people’s memories; the whole nation has been labelled a norm breaker and rogue state (Subotić, 2013, p. 317), so emotional reactions are closely linked to political beliefs. The sheer number of comments pointing to ‘double standards’ of the West and its disrespect for international norms confirms this approach.

Emotions in political contexts are central to actors’ analogical reasoning (Crawford, 2000, pp. 140f.; Hall, 2007): this observation is a key basis for considering geographical analogies as ways of expressing geopolitical emotion. In my view, online comments illustrate the mundane dimensions of the everyday, and are thus a beneficial resource for analyses of analogical thinking in international politics. Although analogy is a widespread, often very productive, mode of structuring human thinking, it has not yet been important in analysing how ordinary people make sense of geopolitics. Political science has concentrated mostly on the role of (particularly historical) analogies in elite actors’ foreign policy decisions (Kaarbo & Kenealy, 2017; Khong, 1992; Prémont et al., 2018), whereas political communication studies have focused on the power of analogies to persuade masses (Paris, 2002). To date, most data has been drawn from the official or elite realm (Ghilani et al., 2017). Research that engaged with everyday operations of political analogy was set in artificial or laboratory contexts (Gilovich, 1981; Schuman & Rieger, 1992). I have tried to fill this gap by studying historical and geographical analogies ‘in use’ on a comment board.

Agnew (2009) referred to political, media and academic elites making ‘strange places familiar’ with analogies based on geopolitical stereotypes. He illuminated the role of analogy as obscure, indirect argument in elite geopolitical reasoning (p. 431). This property of analogies is evident in negotiation of geopolitical knowledge in everyday contexts – their power to immediately invoke associations, memories, and emotions is used by commenters extensively to prove a point. This use is not confined to foreign policy actors or journalistic elites. Analogies, because their emotional load is often high and is packed into compact geopolitical images, have the potential to subvert official political interpretations and generate new narratives. Using irony and other rhetorical devices, everyday communicators create their own analogies across space and time, through which they relate to faraway places in unexpected ways.

Accessing emotions in comments is less straightforward. Emotions are often vague, so it is difficult to grasp what is experienced and at stake when they are felt, communicated, or discussed. Whereas knowledge claims lend themselves to reconstruction rather easily, their emotional underpinnings are often ephemeral.

Because of this difficulty, my interpretive approach to geopolitical emotions is to look for context-specific ‘keys’ available to the audiences as stereotypical cultural stocks of knowledge, from which one can build geopolitical narratives with building blocks derived from both knowledge and emotion. On Politika’s comment board, the key to this emotional load is users’ expressed attitude towards the commented reality: inat, which I understand as a response to a deeply felt international humiliation of Serbia in the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars (on Serbia’s image in the Western media, see Sobel & Shiraev, 2002, p. 88; Subotić, 2013).

DATA AND METHODS

Politika is the medium best suited for examining Serbian attitudes towards Russia and its international behaviour because of the paper’s prestige and popularity in Serbia and ex-Yugoslavia more broadly. As a broadsheet of record with a daily circulation of over 100,000 copies, it enjoys the status of a national cultural institution in its own right; its online edition, active since 2006, is sometimes called ‘a folk parliament online’. It is known to the audience in the post-Yugoslav contexts for its conservative, centre-right views, more often than not favourable to Russia’s international actions (Pralica & Janjić, 2016). This generally Russia-inclined audience mitigates Russia’s need for organized ‘trolling’ to shape the discourse.

Examining Politika as ‘the’ Serbian newspaper par excellence avoids the pitfalls of analysing a directly Russia-sponsored news outlet such as the Serbian issue of Sputnik. Choosing a prestigious broadsheet instead of overtly pro-Russian and anti-Western, or openly anti-Russian and pro-Western sources (e.g., Peščanik) enables capturing discourses that might be classified as mainstream; within the Serbian media scholarship, Politika is generally regarded as reflecting the views of ‘average citizens’ (Valić Nedeljković, 2013, p. 147). This can point to some regularities of geopolitical reasoning relevant to Serbia.

It is safe to assume that Politika’s audience is either fully Serbian or at least comes from a specific geographical and historical context of ex-Yugoslavia, thus sharing cultural capital and similar social stocks of knowledge. To analyse how their understandings of Russia’s actions in Crimea and the Caucasus are formed, it is helpful to conceive of the comments and discussions as containing a form of everyday social knowledge. This approach accesses the discursive dynamics of paralleling regions and peoples, constructing ‘others’ and ‘brothers’ and categorizing geographical territories according to an imagined just political map of the world.

I analysed comments made by readers on the website of Politika during the first month of the Russo-Georgian war (August 2008, set A) and the Crimean crisis (March 2014, set B). Comments were gathered by using a free web scraping agent, Agenty. Only comments placed under articles directly discussing the respective crises were chosen, meaning 92 articles (1692 comments) in set A and 156 articles (4163 comments) in set B.

Of these, only discussions containing more than 50 comments were analysed, but 100 additional comments were selected randomly from both sets for analysis. Thus, in total 720 comments from set A and 1560 comments from set B were analysed (Table 1).

Table 1. Data collected and analysed from Politika articles on the Russo-Georgian War and Crimean crisis.

	Articles total	Comments total	Articles with 50+ comments	Comments fewer than 50+ articles	Comments added by random selection	Analysed comments in total
August 2008	92	1692	9	620	100	720
March 2014	156	4163	20	1460	100	1560
Total	248	5855	29	2080	200	2280

While Politika is pro-Russian leaning overall, commented articles are not fully uncritical of Russia, as the newspaper follows the principles of journalistic ‘objectivity’. Often enough events are reported with a differentiated analysis and many different sources cited; Politika even included critical articles arguing that the newspaper’s own reporting is too pro-Russian (Kandić, 2014). Hence, it would be wrong to assume that the newspaper had indoctrinated commenters into expressing certain views.

Comments were analysed in the context of the articles they were referencing. Articles and comments were coded thematically, with special attention to users’ understandings of geopolitics and their definition of contemporary ‘geopolitical problems’. The gathered comments were analysed qualitatively, using SKAD. Comments, as actualizations of discourses (discursive events) were classified according to their core claims. Knowledge production on the comment board is understood here as a step-by-step process of repetition and addition of statements revolving around the core claims (cf. Keller, 2011, p. 206).

I looked for discursive dimensions of the audience’s understandings of geopolitics with regard to the respective crises. First, I determined the geopolitical ‘problems’ and ‘issues’ identified by users, locally with respect to Serbia, in a broader perspective including Russia/Crimea/Caucasus, and on the global level. Second, I filtered out causes and solutions to the problems, focusing on expressions of emotion, both literal (instances when an emotion was named) and implicit (use of exclamation marks, descriptions of affective states). Third, I discerned the underlying values to which users referred as their shared interest.

As SKAD has not been used to study popular geopolitics before, it is worth illustrating the benefits of this approach. As a method, SKAD is well suited for analysing the interplay of geopolitical knowledge and emotion as it concentrates on how people form ‘operational knowledges’, ways of responding to perceived problems. The SKAD approach builds directly on the social constructivist tradition in the sociology of knowledge (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Schütz & Luckmann, 1979). Intimate operational knowledges are building blocks of wider realms of meaning that become socially objectified through legitimation. Legitimation often happens through reference to some institutional authority, for example, the body of ‘established’ serious academic knowledge on international relations/geopolitics. In the words of Schnettler et al. (2017): ‘there is a universal condition of  …  knowledge: it must be subjectively acquired, either through one’s own experiences or through the “detour” of concrete exemplifications of actual producers of legitimation, i.e., knowledge experts of every stripe’ (pp. 247f.).

The geopolitical arena, traditionally conceptualized as a field of international power competition, generates myriad political and social problems, potentially painfully present in small nations resisting imposed ‘geo-graphing’, writing of their national spaces by stronger power centres (Ó Tuathail, 1996, p. 2). In Serbia, discourses of national victimization abound after the 1990s wars and ensuing dismembering of Yugoslavia. Moreover, the geopolitical field is populated by myriad experts and pundits whose communicative actions add up to widespread popular beliefs and imaginations about one’s own and other countries, conferring upon them institutional legitimation that sometimes propels them even into the mainstream media.

Concerning the interplay of knowledge and emotion, SKAD responds to the need for ‘exploratory concepts’ to guide knowledge analysis (cf. Keller, 2011, p. 57, 2012, p. 68). SKAD is explicitly interested in knowledge structuration and typification; therefore, it can be meaningfully adapted to all social scientific studies on the emergence of social knowledge, whether everyday, academic or institutional.

This analysis was guided by the phenomena that structure problems, specifically, how these become present and perceivable for actors in the first place. It emerged early in the analysis that most of the sampled online comments were formulated as reactions to a problem – most interestingly, not to the actual conflicts in the Caucasus/Crimea, but to problems facing Serbia as an actor in the world of states or to general ‘problems of geopolitics’ (however defined). The commenters on Georgia, Crimea and Russia were actually discussing a much more local and situated ‘problem’, which could be named ‘Serbia’s geopolitical predicament’.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

Great powers and small countries: how commenters understand the nature of geopolitics

‘Great powers are great powers – they adapt reality and facts to their own interests. Thus, on one hand a principal protection of “territorial integrity” is declared, and on the other the right for self-determination.’⁴ In the midst of the Russo-Georgian war in 2008, this commenter was referring to Russia’s contradictory approach to Serbia’s and Georgia’s territorial integrity. He and many others seemed to simply state a geopolitical ‘fact’ that everyone should be aware of if they aspire to ‘really’ understand the situation.

Based on this and similar views, a gloomy picture dominated Politika’s comment board in 2008: Serbia, alongside Georgia and other small nations, was caught between powerful interests, susceptible to manipulation into risky bandwagoning policies and largely deprived of any influence on the ‘games’ of great powers ‘geo-graphing’ their national spaces. Illustrating this predicament, Max continued:

One thing is sure: the USA and Russia will not go to war over Georgia and Kosovo. Both know perfectly well what belongs to whom; when one side is directly intervening militarily, the other is very ‘concerned’ about international law.  …  Just like Milošević fully misjudged American determination and was carried along by Russian support on the Kosovo issue, the Georgian president made the same mistake. But this time the great powers changed their roles.⁵

The fatalistic tone of Max’s comment was also present during the Crimean crisis in 2014. As one commenter put it bluntly, ‘Russia and the US (and other great powers) do not give a shit about Ukraine and Serbia (and other small states). They use them only to justify their respective campaigns of conquest.’⁶

However disappointing this perceived reality, a remarkable change of heart is visible in the comment board between the two crises. In 2008, commenters engaged in fierce debates about Russia’s contradictory behaviour in ‘defending’ Serbia’s territorial integrity internationally, simultaneously recognizing the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. An ‘exotic brotherhood’ line was clearly discernible: claims of striking similarities in historical fates, or direct ethnic relatedness between Serbs, Ossetes and Abkhazians (Pierzynska, 2017). Discussions of Serbian–Russian brotherhood abounded, but simultaneously the question of how safe it was for Serbia to bandwagon with Russia given its ‘double standards’ towards secessionist territories in Georgia and Serbia seemed pressing. A comment announced by its author as historically informed geopolitical analysis illustrates these sentiments:

Western recognition of Kosovo’s independence suited Russia because it functioned as cards thrown on the world’s geopolitics table too soon.  …  Formally, Russia was on Serbia’s side although recognizing Kosovo suited its own interests in the Caucasus; so it did not create a big drama and left it to each country’s conscience to recognize Kosovo’s independence.⁷

In 2014, only a few commenters still discussed ‘Russian imperialism’ or inconsistencies in Russia’s global policies that put Serbia at risk; their views were passionately countered and dismissed by most participants. Elaborate arguments against any contradictions in Russia’s international behaviour were developed, and a spite-induced enthusiasm dominated the Politika comment board (‘I am so glad that it is Putin with our brother Russians who is reminding the West it is now left to eat its own balls!’⁸).

How did the commenters dismiss the inconsistency and insincerity arguments? One strategy appealed to norms and morality which generated the sense of satisfaction over the Western inability to prevent Russia’s operations in Crimea. In this reading, it matters less whether Russia’s actions are just and lawful in themselves; rather, the ‘tit for tat’, inat-induced element fuels gloating about Western ‘punishment’ for its geopolitical arrogance and is sufficient justification for the pro-Russian stance. In other words, justice can be done by whatever means necessary. Once international norms were broken (by the West in inciting the Yugoslav wars, especially Operation Storm in Serbian Krajina in 1995 and the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999), their erosion was complete – Russia and its ally Serbia are not obliged to adhere to them. However, while recognizing Crimea’s independence – seen as a sine qua non of its lawful incorporation into Russia – might harm Serbia’s own interests, many commenters would have been ready to accept it. This position, a remarkable example of inat, was expressed furiously by a user who chose the nickname ‘Priznajem odcepljenje Krima!’ (I recognize the separation of Crimea!). In his words, ‘Serbia will surely recognize Crimean independence! We too can follow the Western double standards – we DO NOT recognize the separation of Kosovo, but DO recognize the separation of Crimea from Ukraine.’⁹

Apart from ‘double standards’, users discussed what is needed to change the geopolitical world order.

America is ‘protecting’ its interests all around the world, for example it sent 150 thousand soldiers against Afghanistan, not to mention all places where they sent their military, causing chaos and death, whatever place, only poverty and devastation is left when they leave. Moreover, they adopted a resolution giving themselves the right to protect every US citizen wherever he happens to be, but they refuse Russia this same right.¹⁰

Rade SRB’s comment, to which many others posted their own endorsements, suggests that international intervention by ‘great powers’ in their own spheres of interest is now seen as a right that should be extended to Russia. Others even imply that it would also mean Serbia’s right to intervene in Kosovo again. In this reading, users often display a cynical understanding of the world as a theatre of power conflicts in which all the rules have long been broken and only pure power reigns. Even commenters criticizing Putin largely share this view. For instance, Fizicar USA reasons that:

with Georgia and now Ukraine, Putin is wrong to draw parallels to Kosovo.  …  If he is searching for the truth, he should say that Russia possesses this same right that NATO claimed when it forcibly seized Kosovo from Serbia. Therefore, Russia also has a right to forcibly seize parts of Georgia, Ukraine or Moldova (in a future military operation).¹¹

It is worth noting the inverted commas commenters often use to talk about the US ‘responsibility to protect’ policy worldwide. Even ‘democratic values’, ‘Western values’ and ‘justice’ often appear in inverted commas, suggesting the exact opposite of the articulated meaning. The irony so often encountered on Politika’s comment board – like all political irony – is subversive (Hutcheon, 1995). As Ridanpää (2009) suggested, it becomes a tool in the commenters’ hands to negotiate geopolitical meanings and establish identities. To a careful observer of the comment board, it appears somewhat as a ‘hangman’s noose’ – to be used by the hopeless and embittered, disgusted, and disillusioned.

Ironic dismissal of the compromised West and uncritical endorsement of all Russia’s actions are not the only strategies of establishing continuity within the mainstream narrative on Russia’s ‘protection’ of Serbia despite the contradictions generated by Russia’s behaviour in Georgia and Ukraine. When users test Russia’s intentions towards Serbia in view of its Caucasian and Ukrainian adventures, they develop elaborate arguments about what constitutes a ‘correct’ mode of analogizing between the local Serbian and the distant Georgian/Crimean situation.

Ethnicities and analogies: how commenters feel about geopolitics

One direction explored by commenters is the ethnic and religious question. Because Russia is intervening in a place where the majority of the population declares Russian ethnicity and language, its intervention is justified.

Ukraine is a country poorly thrown together, artificially connected, just as the former Yugoslavia was. The left shore of the Dnepr is Russian, with Russian Orthodox population, the right shore is old Ukraine with a pure Uniate population. Oil and water, Serbs and Croats, there is no theoretical basis for ‘coexistence’, only domination and revenge.¹²

Noting the swift transition from Russians/Ukrainians to Serbs/Croats, the reader is tempted to ask another fundamental question. If the ethnicity card is used in legitimizing Russia’s moves, how can commenters justify their own stance against Kosovo’s independence? As a rule, these two views come together. However, even in Yugoslavia, the province was overwhelmingly Albanian, and a constant outflow of the Serbian population continues until today. Nowadays, Kosovo is 93% ethnically Albanian.

The answer to this question can be found in discussions of the domestic political cleavage between pro-EU, pro-NATO forces (mostly non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and opposition parties) and ‘everybody else’. The pro-Western liberal activists, regularly labelled ‘Second Serbia’ by their critics (Russel-Omaljev, 2016) are accused of treason; commenters see them as willing to trade Serbia’s territorial integrity for their own political benefit.¹³ As a response to pro-Western groups pinpointing paradoxes in Russia’s dismissal of Kosovo’s independence, and in rebuttal to comments alluding to them,¹⁴ users engage in an exegesis of Putin’s behaviour and words. ‘Wrong are those (chiefly the on-call Russophobes) who claim that Putin wants Crimea and Kosovo to be equalled. He is throwing [his declarations] into the face of the US and EU in order to stultify their policies.’¹⁵ In the latter part of his elaborate comment, the ethnically dominated, ‘age-old’ possessed territory argument reveals what the user sees as an ‘appropriate’ analogy:

On the contrary, the (two) situations are very different. Crimea has always been Russian and was incorporated barely some decades ago into Ukraine, which itself has never existed as an independent country. Kosovo has been Serbian since times immemorial, this is official, and now it cannot separate from Serbia, not even through bombing or occupation. The bottom line is that the West’s hypocrisy and double standards are being openly exposed and not that Putin supports independent Kosovo, as the Russophobes would have it.¹⁶

In this reading, the analogy between Kosovo and Crimea becomes its own opposite. While the geopolitical order operates in a similar way, the situation on the ground is diametrically different. This difference is indispensable in the reasoning that aims at simultaneously defending Russia’s recognition of the Caucasian de facto states, its annexation of Crimea, and patronage over the Kosovo issue. It is also used to engage with Yugoslavia’s own troubled history with Kosovo and point out who is to blame for its loss – the Communist leaders in the 1970s.

Drawing parallels between Kosovo and Crimea is not possible. In Crimea, there is a majority Russian population that supports the entry of the Russian military, everything is happening without any protest.  …  As concerns Kosovo, its population doesn’t want to live within Serbia, and Kosovo’s status had been cemented by the Yugoslav Constitution of 1974.  …  This was the will of the Serbian leadership, and Kosovo became factually independent.  …  This means in practice that once you wilfully donate something to somebody, you need this somebody’s permission to take it back. This is a fact of life not only when we talk about territorial questions.¹⁷

Denying the existence of analogy while drawing it was a strategy used in the comment board in 2008, too, during the Russo-Georgian war. Interestingly, Kosovo was not the only territory used in this way. Another pervasive parallel is the fate of Serbian Krajina. Soon after military operations in Georgia ended, Deki commented:

There is no similarity between Milošević and the guy from Georgia. Milošević merely tried to save the country from inevitable secessionism.  …  I find more similarities between Saakashvili and Franjo’s¹⁸ Croatia, when he tried to make a blitzkrieg ethnic cleansing in Ossetia.¹⁹

This motif, which reappeared frequently throughout the discussion, refers to the Croatian army’s US-backed Operation Storm, which constitutes one nodal point of recent Serbian public memory. It returns in 2014, in comments on Russian success in saving its compatriots from the tragic fate of Serbian refugees from Krajina after Operation Storm: ‘Russia has protected its nation from Operation Storm, the Serbs are far behind.’²⁰

The Krajina analogy is an illustrative explanatory lens employed to explain the Russo-Georgian war and the Crimean crisis. In these two events, the real aim was to prevent Western-led destruction of kin peoples (Russians, Caucasian Orthodox nations) through great power games played in vulnerable regions, first rehearsed in the Balkans during the Yugoslav wars and NATO bombing in 1999. In accordance with Livingstone’s (1999) assertion that old and new interplay in knowledge production in the media, the comment board treats Serbian history as a mirror through which the Georgian and Crimean events are understood and interpreted.

The Krajina theme not only lends itself to transposition into other regions of ethnic conflict: it possesses a deep emotional load and connotes a national trauma that all commenters can easily relate to. Memory of Operation Storm undoubtedly belongs to the stock of knowledge shared by all commenters, as it is an important part of the official public memory policy in Serbia. Its significance and emotional power are not only symbolic. The Krajina theme formed part of the lived experience of all Serbia’s inhabitants, as masses of Krajina refugees were placed in temporary accommodation (in private houses, temporary camps, schools, ‘collective centres’, motels, etc.) and quickly began to be perceived as a social problem (Konitzer & Grujić, 2009).

Why is the Krajina analogy so pervasive? As a clear trauma-inducing generational experience, Belgrade’s official policy towards the Serbian separatist territory within Croatia is widely perceived as manipulative and unjust, ultimately leading to the refugee exodus of 1995 by refusing concrete help. This sentiment serves as a negative pole against which Russia’s actions of ‘helping’ its compatriots in Crimea, Abkhazia and South Ossetia are viewed positively. Russia is thus seen as displaying courage and power that 1990s Serbia lacked.

The Krajina analogy seems to be attractive due to what Fierke (2006) calls the ‘habitual social memory’ of trauma (p. 131), which structures understandings of the geopolitical landscape. Habitual memory is perpetually experienced and acted out in communication, whereby the traumatic past seems to be ever-present and constantly repeating itself (p. 132).

Throughout their interaction on the comment board, the commenters generated a body of ‘geopolitical knowledge’, consisting of political interpretations, normative judgements, and expressions of emotion. During my own interpretative engagement with the comments, I ‘distilled’ some elements of this knowledge and organized it into a phenomenal structure. The ‘issues’ users attempt to address seem twofold. On the one hand is Serbia’s geopolitical predicament. On the other is the unjust world order that stigmatizes, humiliates, and conquers small nations.

My summary of the phenomenal structure of the problems addressed by users in 2008 and 2014 is presented in Table 2. The section ‘competing knowledges’ points to conflicting perspectives on the ‘problems’ most frequently discussed in the comments.

Table 2. Geopolitical issues, solutions and emotions in commenters’ debates on the Russo-Georgian war (2008) and Crimean crisis (2014).

Discursive dimensions	2008 (set A)	2014 (set B)
1. Problem	Geopolitical marginalization of Serbia	Geopolitical marginalization of Serbia
	World domination by US/EU and NATO	World domination by US/EU and NATO
2. Causes	Great power games over domination of small nations	Great power games over domination of small nations
	Great power rivalry over resources (Caucasian oil and gas)	Great power rivalry (military and strategic: Black Sea)
	Lack of realist geopolitical thinking by Serbian politicians
	Disregard for Serbia’s history, lack of historical knowledge in the population	Disregard for Serbia’s history, lack of historical knowledge in the population
	Actions of the US and the ‘West’	Actions of the EU and the ‘West’
3. Proposed solutions	Turning away from the West	Turning away from the West
	Associating with Russia	Associating with Russia
	Dissemination of geopolitical knowledge	Dissemination of geopolitical knowledge
	Associating with other small Orthodox nations (Ossetia, Abkhazia, ‘exotic brotherhoods’)	Serbian–Russian alliance (brotherhood)
4. Emotions	Rejoicing in Western ‘defeat’ against Russia (spite)	Rejoicing in Western ‘defeat’ against Russia (spite)
	Sadness, resignation	Joy, happiness
	Disgust over Western geopolitical machinations	Hope the world became multipolar finally
5. Values	Orthodoxy, pursuing peace internationally, nation	Orthodoxy, nation
6. Competing knowledges	Bandwagoning with Russia versus ‘doing nothing’ or complying with Western expectations and values	Bandwagoning with Russia versus complying with Western expectations and values
	Russia’s ‘double standards’ on Kosovo versus Ossetia, Abkhazia – how safe is it for Serbia to bandwagon?	Russia’s ‘double standards’ – issue solved, ‘double standards’ claims largely dismissed

CONCLUSIONS

The two clearly identifiable emotional dispositions found on Politika’s comment board are sadness about great powers’ policies in the Balkans and the humiliation of Serbia, and hope of reaching a more just, multipolar world. Both attitudes connect in the emotional nodal point of inat (‘spite, defiance’): Serbia’s humiliation can be vindicated through Russia’s actions in distant places, even if this means embracing policies that endanger Serbia’s territorial integrity. The sadness of 2008 transitions into satisfaction in 2014 through a detour of spite and gloating over Western defeat. Spite, stemming from previous historical humiliation, drives the satisfaction about Russia’s victory over the West’s exponent, Georgia. Spite and hope for a new beginning fill the emotional landscape of 2014 – the bitter satisfaction over Western inability to intervene in Crimea is coupled with joy over the prospect of global change.

Users’ emotional investments and geopolitical positions are expressed through analogies placed on two axes: old–new and close–distant. The actual events commented upon are interwoven with the trauma-inducing experiences of the Yugoslav wars and the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The new and unknown (Caucasus, Crimea) is accessed and understood through the old and known (Yugoslavia, Serbia). The old and the new are mutually explanatory: by looking at one, we are ‘bound’, as one commenter puts it, to understand the other. Indeed, some comments do not even discuss the events, instead stating simply: ‘Seen already,’²¹ ‘Krajina again,’²² ‘Vojna Krajina, Kosovo, Ossetia – things are clear’.²³

The remote regions of the Caucasus and the Black Sea become familiar through transposition onto Yugoslav history and territory. This collapse of time and space is thematized as a ‘natural’ condition of the political world in which great powers play a ‘geopolitical game’ over the heads of small nations.

The comments point to a fatalist disposition, a generalized belief about the obvious essence of the global world order that manifests itself in different geographical locations and historical times. In the commenters’ view, modern international politics equals power politics in which the winner takes it all. The West (winner) engaged in geopolitical manipulations and warmongering in the 1990s and ‘took it all’ in the Balkans; later, it tried to do the same with the Caucasus. The scenarios appear identical.

The commenters are immersed in the world of classical imperial geopolitics, great power rivalries over the Balkans and the Caucasus, territory (Kosovo, Krajina), and resources (Caucasian oil). They interpret the Yugoslav wars, Kosovo war, and Russo-Georgian war as acts that ultimately stem from 19th-century geopolitical reasoning and colonization, where the colonized (Yugoslavia, later Serbia) can only choose the lesser evil and better protector.

The puzzle of reconciling ‘contradictory’ Russian behaviours through the audience becomes solvable in the context of this crude understanding of the nature of geopolitics: Russia is just one actor in a great power play, and one can justify its actions as long as one is aligned with its position in the geopolitical game. Russia’s geopolitical behaviour was summed up by evoking the old image of the world as a chessboard: ‘Putin is not only excellent at playing chess but is an equal master at poker.’²⁴ Traditional imperial geopolitics constitutes the main explanatory lens through which events were perceived. Against this background, recent calls for geopolitics to be made an official subject in secondary schools seem a logical continuation of the revival of traditional geopolitical thought observable in Serbia from the 1990s (Ćolović, 2000, p. 307).

Although the emotional vector on the comment board changed from sadness to hope between 2008 and 2014, this did not reflect a change in the users’ perceptions of the crude nature of geopolitics. Rather, it raised the possibility of ‘our Russian brothers’ becoming a more powerful and respected player in the geopolitical theatre. The commenters still regard essence of all foreign policy as a cruel power game fuelled only by interests, never by ideas.

This cynical view has important implications for how audiences in crisis-torn regions are conceptualized. It indicates that people’s feelings of national humiliation and their needs to associate with actors often dismissed as ‘nationalist’ need to be taken seriously. It also shows that everyday understandings of the nature of geopolitics as a power play for territory and resources are as much alive today as they were a century ago, no matter how much political elites avoid presenting their international policies in such frames to domestic and international audiences.

These findings appear significant in the light of the 2019 public survey on security perceptions conducted by the FES Regional Office for Cooperation and Peace in Europe. Out of six European countries, Serbia had the highest proportion of respondents (85%) expressing dissatisfaction with their country’s status in the world (Krumm et al., 2019, p. 53). It was also the country least likely to expect any international actor to actively take a leadership role in international politics. At the same time, Serbian respondents strongly linked their own international prosperity to that of other countries – dispositions likely born out of resignation and fatalism, evident on Politika’s comment board.

The popular, everyday sense of geopolitics on the comment board operates on the level of emotional reactions to perceived injustices by great powers and is expressed through historical and geographical analogy. This may apply also in other places where the vectors of political allegiances change. For instance, it would be educational to investigate whether the frames found in this study are present in Georgian audiences’ reactions to the Crimean crisis or Kosovo’s independence declaration. How does a Georgian audience reconcile their (US) protector’s support for Kosovo with its uncompromising declarations for Georgian territorial integrity and against independence for South Ossetia and Abkhazia? The emotional vector would inevitably change, but the interesting question is how much difference this would make to overall sentiment towards bigger countries’ meddling in small nations’ politics in vulnerable regions. Similar research was attempted by Radnitz (2019) in relation to the Karabakh conflict; however, more analysis is needed to understand lay perceptions of geopolitical interactions and the notion of geopolitics itself.

This analysis confirms Chaterje-Doody and Crilley’s (2019, p. 185) observation that images of conflict in the media impact on audiences by virtue of their power to convey identities that resonate. Naturally, Politika’s comments do not represent the whole – or even the online portion – of the Serbian public sphere. However, as discursive interventions, the comments reflect how audiences make sense of political events and view the discipline of geopolitics. For particular historical, societal, and geographical contexts, they provide insights into emotions that underpin geopolitical imaginations and constructions of ‘others and brothers’.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

Notes

1 Zorko Lala, comment on the Politika website, 1 March 2014. All online comments are translated by the author; commenters’ usernames are preserved in the original.

2 Some EU countries never recognized Kosovo’s independence, largely due to their own unresolved territorial disputes. These include Spain, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Cyprus.

3 Nikola Djukic, 3 March 2014.

4 Max, 12 August 2008.

5 Max, 12 August 2008.

6 Boban Pro, 3 March 2014.

7 Jusuf Žilić, 8 August 2008.

8 Sosa iz dijaspore, 13 March 2014.

9 Priznajem odcepljenje Krima, 3 March 2014. To obtain a full picture of inat, compare the words ascribed to Slobodan Milošević after Western sanctions were imposed on the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia in the 1990s: ‘It doesn’t matter that we cannot go abroad. We will close our borders too, so they will also not be able to come here!’

10 Rade SRB, 1 March 2014.

11 4 March 2014.

12 Stevan Simic, 1 March 2014.

13 It is important to accentuate ‘their own’ benefit as opposed to Serbia’s, for example, from the country’s accession to the EU. ‘Personal’ benefits refer to many pro-Western NGOs financed by foundations and political initiatives based in the West or declaring allegiance to ‘Western values’.

14 For example, Matija Soskic’s 4 March 2014 comment on Putin’s declaration: ‘If Kosovo can do it, so can Crimea’: ‘With this statement, Putin has just closed his own mouth.’ See also another comment from the same discussion thread by Branislav Miloradovic: ‘This statement does not favour the passionate Russophiles at all, does it? So what are we gonna do now, hm?’

15 Joca Jocić, 4 March 2014.

16 Joca Jocić, 4 March 2014.

17 Aleksandar Aleksandar, 4 March 2014.

18 Franjo Tuđman, first president of the independent Croatia after the fall of Yugoslavia.

19 14 August 2008.

20 Stevan Simic, 1 March 2014.

21 Gordana, BG, 7 August 2008; Poredjenje, 8 August 2008; Srle, 9 August 2008.

22 Ljuba,7 August 2008.

23 spasenija kolcek, 8 August 2008. Vojna Krajina is a historical reference to the Serb-inhabited Military Frontier region within the Habsburg Empire whose descendants largely formed the separatist Serbian Krajina in the 1990s.

24 Sitmejkeri sitplejleri, 13 March 2014.