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- Convenors:
-
Rozafa Berisha
(University of Prishtina)
Claudia Eggart (University of Manchester)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Thursday 25 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
How can anthropology contribute to “locate” the geopolitical? How do we approach geopolitics ethnographically? This panel builds on an emerging anthropological interest in geopolitics to consider it as both a subject of scholarly analysis and lived experience.
Long Abstract:
Since feminists argued in the 1970s that "the personal is political" (Hanisch 1970), a prolific cross-disciplinary scholarship explored how the political manifests in people’s everyday lives. The post-Cold War re-ordering of global power structures, however, laid bare the limits of the nation-states politics, revealing how the political is frequently saturated with “geopolitics”. While anthropology has long been invested in examining the ways global power structures unevenly shape everyday lives, such questions were elaborated under the auspices of globalization, border, or mobilities studies. Geopolitics as a subject of anthropological analysis, in and for itself, has entered the discipline only recently. Addressing how the 'geopolitical becomes personal' (Jansen, 2009, p. 821), anthropologists explored its manifestation in the intimate (Smith, 2020) and everyday (Jansen, 2009) realms of life, as well as the subject’s navigational agency under volatile geopolitical circumstances (Marsden, 2021).
This panel builds on this emerging anthropological interest in geopolitics to consider it as both a subject of scholarly analysis and a lived experience. Geopolitics, despite its recent inflationary use, remains a slippery term. Operating across multiple scales, it takes shape through a complex entanglement between the global, national, local and individual. Therefore, we ask how can anthropology contribute to “locate” the geopolitical. How do we approach geopolitics ethnographically? Can anthropological tools help us to capture the complex entanglements and mutually co-producing effects across micro- and macro-scales? We invite papers from diverse contexts that seek a better understanding of affective, material, and everyday effects of increasingly adverse geopolitical forces today.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 25 July, 2024, -Volha Biziukova (Brown Univerisity)
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines the political effects of geopolitical imaginaries and their intersection with the "state-civilization" narrative in shaping the modes of political engagement on the ground in contemporary Russia.
Paper long abstract:
The paper explores the ways in which geopolitical imaginaries inform perceptions of the state and state-citizen relations in Russia. It asks how tracing the role and political effects of these imaginaries helps us understand the dynamics of society's response to the state's radicalizing politics and policies, including Russia's war on Ukraine. I examine the interplay between state ideological narratives, which draw on geopolitical tropes, and the interpretive frameworks and strategies through which people on the ground make sense of unfolding developments. Inquiring how the global is constructed through the framework of the national (Fernandes 2000), I ask about the specificity of geopolitical imaginaries that emerge with the rise of the "state-civilization" narrative in Russian political discourse and its connection to the notion of multiple modernities. I further identify the models of relationships between the state and citizens that this geopolitically driven politics imposes and how it redefines the idea of a nation-state and classical nationalism. Further, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Moscow and Smolensk in 2015-2019, I analyze the ways these geopolitical and civilizational narratives are translated and embraced by citizens on the ground, including discrepancies and convergences with the official discourse. I consider how such frameworks become congruent with authoritarian governance and, alternatively, provide a potential basis for political critique. In particular, I describe how the Russian state is perceived as a reified historical subject within the global geopolitical constellation and how this perception shapes the modes of political engagement.
Sanna Vellava (University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how the geopolitical turmoil brought by the Ukrainian war materialized on the ground in a Finnish town, hosting a Russian owned data center. This led to moral ambivalence and reorganization of relationships between the center and the municipality.
Paper long abstract:
A data center of Global DC, formerly known as Yandex Oy, is located in a small Finnish town called Mäntsälä. The ‘Russian Google’ has been providing its waste heat to the local district heating systems since its opening in 2015, forming a part of the town infrastructure by warming homes of the town residents. Initially, the Yandex data center was celebrated in Mäntsälä as a pioneer in ecological sustainability through recycling its waste heat and importantly, bringing significant tax incomes to the municipality. Then, the Russian invasion to Ukraine in March 2022 caused a sudden disruption in the relationships between the data center and the municipality.
This paper provides an example of ‘locating the geopolitical’ by tracing the affective and material effects brought by the intense geopolitical turmoil and what it meant for various actors involved in this particular context. Overnight, the geopolitical risks associated with the Russian company actualized, and the data center became an object of criticism. Its presence and role were questioned and re-evaluated, evoking moral ambivalence among the residents while complicating the daily operations of the data center. However, because of the economic and infrastructural embeddedness of the data center in Mäntsälä, no obvious solutions to the moral dilemma associated with the center were available.
Based on conversations with data center employees, local residents and decision makers of Mäntsälä, this paper examines how the dramatic change in the geopolitical situation materialized on the ground level.
Elsayed Elsehamy Abdelhamid (The University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses how the geopolitical becomes a shared concern among Egyptian exiles in Istanbul, defining their access to legal statuses and settlement polices in Turkey and marking their lifeworlds and political trajectories.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses how shifting geopolitical circumstances shape inconsistent state desires among young, displaced Egyptians in Istanbul, defining their settlement decisions in Turkey or pushing them to pursue asylum in Europe. The 2013 military coup against the Muslim Brotherhood government displaced thousands of Egyptians to Turkey. Given the ideological proximity, the majority of them were granted exceptional entry and residency permits and/or the exceptional Turkish citizenship. The two countries cut diplomatic relations up until 2020. Turkey pursued normalization with Egypt, mainly for geopolitical purposes, including redrawing eastern Mediterranean maritime borders for gas exploration. Cairo requested silencing the Istanbul-based exile community and limiting the Turkish military intervention in neighboring Libya. Turkey gradually stopped issuing exceptional legal permits for many Egyptians and asked high-profile activists to leave its territory, which generated fears of deportations to Egypt. Turkey's selective exercise of sovereignty in issuing exceptional legal statuses, to exert pressure then reassure international ties with Egypt, shaped the everyday pursuits for “legal stability” among post-2013 young Egyptians. Located between two rival yet allied MENA states with fluctuating relations, the paper highlights "everyday diplomacy" practices (Marsden 2016) of a group of Egyptians to prevent deportations and secure legal residences in Turkey. The geopolitical becomes a catalyst for local activism and a factor of multiple displacements simultaneously. The paper employs life history-informed methods showing how the geopolitical is a vivid everyday embodied concern.
Claudia Eggart (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing from fieldwork with cross-border actors from Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, I propose the notion of lived geopolitics to study ethnographically how transnational mobilities of goods and people can help to ground geopolitics as a category of practice rather than an elite discourse exclusively.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing from fieldwork with cross-border merchants in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, as well as logistic workers at the border triangle between Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania, my presentation summarizes a wealth of ethnographic impressions that speak to the emergent field of an anthropology of geopolitics. I suggest the concept of ‘lived geopolitics’ that, in a nutshell, attends to the ‘geo’ in geopolitics, as a category of practice that can be studied as ‘affective engagement with regulation’ (Jansen, 2009, p. 815) and ‘unequally distributed’ mobilities (Reeves, 2012, p. 4). The approach to geopolitics as lived emphasises the regulation of flows inherent to geopolitical projects from above, as factors that limit and facilitate particular opportunities for cross-border actors. Attending to my interlocutors’ navigation of multiple, partly contradictory regulatory regimes allows me to shed light on their masterly performance of everyday logistics, combining physical, technological, and supply chain infrastructures in light of predatory, or at least unstable social, economic, and (geo)political environment. What my reading of geopolitics contributes to existing approaches is that it neither relegates geopolitics to the background, nor treats it as elite discourse, or intimate experience exclusively. Instead, it combines 1) geopolitical discourses with 2) personal experiences, and 3) material, immaterial, and imagined cross-border networks, thus drawing attention to the co-constitutive effects of macro-and micro-scale processes. In so doing, my approach complicates an hierarchical understanding of scales, breaking up the word in vertical or horizontal topographies of power.
James Hundley (Rowan University)
Paper short abstract:
The geopolitical cannot be separated from the biopolitical when it concerns Indigenous nations. This paper explores the bio-geopolitical nexus with Indigenous nations in North America and Europe whose liminality highlights why this matters for anthropology and border studies.
Paper long abstract:
This paper contributes to the anthropological exploration of geopolitics by placing it in dialogue with biopolitics. I argue that anthropologists cannot locate the geopolitical without considering the biopolitical. Recent scholarship on settler colonialism and Indigeneity (Dietrich and Knopf 2023) posits that geo- and biopolitics exist in a dialectical relationship, and taken together, these concepts help scholars to better understand settler colonialism. This paper will examine the geo-biopolitical nexus of two Indigenous communities: the Coast Salish of the Pacific Northwest of North America whose lands spans the Canada/US border, and the Sápmi (Sámi) whose territory is split by four nation-states in northern Europe. I consider the ways in which Indigenous nations are caught in a liminal position in borderlands and what this means for the anthropology of the geopolitical. The nation-state remains one of the more salient concepts for thinking about identity, yet, for Indigenous nations this relationship is always a contentious one. The lived experience of Indigenous peoples in the borderlands of nation-states is often neglected in both border studies and anthropology. This paper queries the local as a transnational space by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with the Coast Salish and putting it in dialogue with existing ethnography with the Sápmi.
Dietrich, René and Kerstin Knopf, eds. 2023. Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life: Settler States and Indigenous Presence. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bilge Firat (University of Texas at El Paso)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on from ethnographic fieldwork on the makings of energy and infrastructure geopolitics as an everyday occupation conducted during the onset of the Ukraine War, this paper argues for the oft-neglected role of culture in geopolitics to bolster future anthropological engagements with it.
Paper long abstract:
Critical geopolitics scholars have long pointed at how geopolitics exhibit therapeutic and prophetic functions for those who are on the receiving end of the message. In the wake of the Soviet system’s downfall, there has been a noticeable resurgence in the global interest in geopolitics to anticipate and shape future global dynamics. This increasing interest in geopolitics is in part because of the active participation of new players in their respective areas of influence but also due to the so-called democratization of knowledge and expertise in relation to the anticipation and management of an increasingly uncertain future. In order to achieve this, actors who consider themselves experts in geopolitics commercialize, privatize, and widely distribute their geopolitical visions and initiatives. Building upon a previous exploration of geopolitics as an ethnographic subject and focus (Firat 2022; https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12649), this paper advocates for the exploration of the cultures of geopolitical expertise as a research agenda, aiming to strengthen the occasional engagement of anthropologists with geopolitics. In order to substantiate my thesis, the paper will use the findings of my research on the joint makings of geopolitics, infrastructure, and expertise pertaining to fossil gas in the post-Soviet era. This research was conducted during the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022, which coincided with gas supply disruptions.
Makar Tereshin (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
The paper theorises the geopolitics of outer space from the fringes of the Russian space industry in Central Kazakhstan. Bringing the focus of space exploration back down to Earth demonstrates that outer space’s frontiers are also firmly grounded in geopolitical borders.
Paper long abstract:
For Russia, outer space presents an important geopolitical arena. It is a space onto which the state’s social, economic, technological, and military potency has been projected since the inception of the Soviet space program. Today, Cosmodrome Baikonur, Russia’s main gateway to space, with its grand infrastructure, is an important stage for the performance of the state's sovereignty in the face of competing nation-states and private enterprises.
However, Russia’s access to space from Baikonur hinges on a delicate political arrangement with Kazakhstan, where the Cosmodrome is located. Since the early 1990s, the Cosmodrome, along with the adjacent city of Baikonur, has been leased by Russia from Kazakhstan. Essentially, Russian and Kazakhstani nationals found themselves living in a closed extraterritorial Russian enclave, as the city was fenced off from the rest of the Republic. The fact that Kazakhstan, despite its strong emphasis on national sovereignty and its role in space exploration, gave up part of its land was seen as a betrayal by Kazakhstani citizens of Baikonur.
In this paper, I will draw attention to how Russian-Kazakhstani land rights and visions of a sovereign state are defined and rearranged in and around the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Specifically, I will interrogate how, in questioning the legitimacy of continuous Russian presence and the credibility of their own state, Kazakhstani residents of Baikonur articulate uneven political arrangements of the lease agreement and what it tells us about larger polities to which it belongs.
Alysa Ghose (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents ethnography of one family’s planned migration trajectory from Cuba to the US in order to locate the nexus of lived geopolitical factors across time and space that weigh on ordinary Cubans’ ability to live with dignity.
Paper long abstract:
The personal and political as bounded and discrete categories have long been undone both in broader social imaginaries as well as Social Anthropology. The anthropology of reproduction has been a crucial subfield that has helped this problematisation (the separation between the private and domestic on one hand and the public on the other) at the scale of individual, family, community and nation (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995). As these varying scales come together, so do the nuances of geopolitics. The embargo the US imposed on Cuba in 1958 has reached a global magnitude and done extreme harm over the last 66 years (Andaya 2021; Holbraad 2021). The socioeconomic impact on Cuba has been exacerbated by the economic crises that the world over is experiencing as well as being further affected by cycles of rebuilding post-hurricane–which are increasing in frequency due to climate change— (Sheller 2020), and finally a downturn in tourism that the island has seen since Covid-19. This paper presents ethnography of one family’s migration trajectory from Cuba to the US in order to locate the nexus of ‘lived’ geopolitical factors across time and space that weigh on ordinary Cubans’ ability to live with dignity (cf. Marsden 2021:9). It attends to the complicated lived experiences of reproduction, kinship and relatedness and how migration becomes a means by which aspirations surrounding the former dynamics can be realised as their interconnections throw the category of the geopolitical into harsh relief.
Rozafa Berisha (University of Prishtina)
Paper short abstract:
Geopolitics has been understood as the "spatial organization of power" on a global scale. But how does something seemingly so far beyond the individual become an emically articulated concern for people in their everyday lives? This paper takes affect as a modality of engagement with geopolitics.
Paper long abstract:
Geopolitics has been understood as the "spatial organization of power" on a global scale. But how does something seemingly so far beyond the individual become an emically articulated concern for people in their everyday lives? Or, in other words, how does geopolitics become “real”? Building on ethnographic fieldwork with Kosovar youth between 2018 and 2019, this paper takes affect as a modality of engagement with geopolitics. Tracing the emic articulation of a collectively felt boredom within the café routine of Kosovar youth, this paper explores how the geopolitically produced spatiotemporal hierarchies of worthiness—the world system of ranking that assigns value to different locations—are experienced in sites of everyday sociality.
In the relatively newly independent state of Kosovo, prosperity, stability and state-building are intricately linked to future EU membership. This positiontality, however, has in the local imagination rendered the polity a “not-yet,” stagnant spatiotemporal location with a felt dissonance between the actual and the possible. I trace how Kosovar youth geopoliticise the affect of boredom as a byproduct of inhabiting a “not-yet” spatiotempoal location that limits their access to the promised “European” futures. In taking seriously how youth “sense” the geopolitical positionality of their state, the paper considers affect as constitutive not only of the political, as anthropologists have long emphasized, but also of the geopolitical (Navaro-Yashin 2005; Jansen 2009; Laszcakowski and Reeves 2015). The paper also questions the possibility of maintaining two productive domains of geopolitics: as an etic, analytical category, and as an emic, lived reality.