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 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.