Russkiy Mir: The Geopolitics of Russian Compatriots Abroad

Abstract

This paper argues that the instrumental reference to Russian 'compatriots' in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 served as a discursive framing to justify contradictions in Russian approaches to state sovereignty to an international audience. Contrary to teleological readings of Russian foreign policy, however, the paper argues that while Russian diaspora policies have been tapped into, the iterative and partially contradictory development thereof on a governmental level suggests that these were not the blueprint for a revisionist foreign policy by design. It contextualizes the evolution of Russian diaspora policies against the background of the evolution of the wider 'Russian World' conception and shows how the discourse about the protection of 'compatriots' was contextual and has translated into geopolitical boundary-making at a time when relations between Russia and the West deteriorated.

Küresel Siyasette Moskova’nın Farklı Yüzleri: Covid-19 Salgını ile Mücadele ve Sputnik V

“…Yaklaşık yirmi yıldır, Moskova'nın dış politikası, komşu ülkelere karşı Rus enerjisini ve diasporasını araçsallaştırma (ve hatta silahlaştırma) başarısıyla ilgili olarak ele alınmıştır. (Blank ve Kim, 2016;Pieper, 2020) Kremlin'in son yıllarda kendi anlatısını güçlendirmek için başvurduğu yöntemler de "anlatıyı silahlaştırma" olarak tasvir edilmiştir. (Tyushka, 2021) Bu nedenle, Rusya söz konusu olduğunda, normalde insani veya ekonomik konular bile güç siyasetinin meseleleri olarak kabul edilmektedir.…”

Post-Soviet migrants in Germany, transnational public spheres and Russian soft power

“…This is in spite of the empirical evidence that people's subjective sense of belonging to the "Russian world" and their relationship with Russia vary even between the heavily Russified post-Soviet regions (O'Loughlin, Toal, & Kolosov, 2016) and within one community (Kallas, 2016). Moreover, Russian "diasporas" seem not to be easily mobilized for political causes, and a sense of belonging is separated from political allegiances (Pieper, 2018;Suslov, 2018).…”

Militant Orthodox Fringe: Political Programs of Early 21st Century Serbian Right-Wing Organizations

“…The very concept of Eurasia has had its day in scholarship from a wide variety of researchers, with an equally wide variety of interpretations and political agendas (Ismailov & Papava, 2010; Kazharski, 2019; Lukyanov, 2014; Papava, 2013), and the term itself has seen numerous semantic shifts throughout the time, as it "moved from geology to culture and race, to describe children of ethnically mixed couples, and was in widespread use, for instance, in identifying those born from French-South Asian couples by the French administration in colonized Indochina" (Laruelle, 2016, p. 129). The contemporary concept of Eurasia, however, refers to what Trenin called a "Russia-plus" zone (Trenin, 2001, p. 110), one that is utilized to, to use IR rhetoric, establish Russia as a hegemon, with orbiting subordinate states, closely related to the concept of Russkiy mir (Pieper, 2018). Though Serbian Right Wing groups often stress the wish to distance Serbia from being a subordinate to the West, as they are "opposed to the pro-Western parties dialogues in Serbia, whose commitment to the European Union and Euro-Atlantic integration lead to an ascending loss of statehood, economic devastation, moral and spiritual obstruction, destruction of all perspectives and all values of Serbian society", being Russia's subordinate is, somewhat paradoxically, seen as positive.…”