Alexandra Yatsyk

Brands, cities and (post-)politics: A comparative analysis of urban strategies for the Universiade 2013 and the World Football Cup 2018 in Russia

This article analyses how two large-scale sports events in Russia shape regional identities and brands, and prompt different social and administrative effects in urban milieus. These two mega-events are the Universiade in Kazan’ in 2013 and the Football World Cup to take place in 11 Russian cities, among which we focus more specifically on Nizhny Novgorod. We argue that the logic of municipal and regional authorities is largely based on post-political thinking, with such main priorities as building consensus, securing public order, stimulating consumption, developing investment opportunities, renovating urban areas, and branding and globally promoting regions’ competitive advantages. This logic, however, is often contested by groups concerned about financial transparency and accountability, managerial efficiency, environmental protection, preservation of historical areas and other public issues.

The Four Pillars of Russia’s Power Narrative

The Winter Olympic Games in Sochi and the annexation of Crimea were two major international events in which Russia engaged in early 2014. In spite of all the divergence in the logic underpinning each of them, four concepts strongly resonate in both cases. First, in hosting the Olympics and in appropriating Crimea, Russia was motivated by solidifying its sovereignty as the key concept in its foreign and domestic policies. Second, the scenarios for both Sochi and Crimea were grounded in the idea of strengthening Russia as a political community through mechanisms of domestic consolidation (Sochi) and opposition to unfriendly external forces (the crisis in Ukraine). Third, Sochi and Crimea unveiled two different facets of the logic of normalisation aimed at proving – albeit by different means – Russia’s great power status. Fourth, one of the major drivers of Russian policy in both cases were security concerns in Russia’s southern flanks, though domestic security was also an important part of the agenda.

Refracting Europe: Biopolitical Conservatism and Art Protest in Putin’s Russia

Russia’s voluntary reconsideration of its European identity is an interesting phenomenon that deserves greater academic attention. The EU’s largest neighbour, which had once invested a great deal of effort in closer integration with Europe, nowadays pursues an anti-Western policy of self-sufficiency and distancing from its European partners, a policy many experts deem irrational and detrimental to Russia itself. This chapter tackles a twofold puzzle: how to explain the unexpected U-turn in Russian policies away from the Europeanization track, and what academic categories best fit the task of unpacking the multiple facets of the new animosity in Russia-EU relations?

Regional Dimensions of Global Games: The Case of Sports Mega events in Tatarstan

This chapter addresses practices of preparation for and hosting of sports mega events in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, the study of which is conceptualized within a post-structuralist framework with particular emphasis on post-political—including performative—components of identity building. Based on the Universiade 2013, the XXVII Summer World Student Games held in Kazan, the author scrutinizes how Tatarstan, one of the most self-minded, culturally distinctive and peculiar regions within Russia, finds a balance between integration into nationwide agenda and promotion of its own sub-national identity through major tournaments and championships.

When the party is over: developments in Sochi and Russia after the Olympics 2014

Abstract The 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, were during the preparations and run-up phase intensely followed by the global community and were generally associated with a vast array of problems: political, democratic, economic, ecological and security-related. When the hosting of a mega-event such as the Olympic Games has been awarded to a site in an authoritarian state, the global community has moral responsibilities to live up to. There is a need and an obligation to raise one’s voice and criticize where criticism is due also after the Games are concluded. For Sochi, as for sites of all major sports events, continued critical attention is therefore warranted also after the competitions. It is essential to try to gauge the extent to which predicted problems materialized, what happened afterwards and what have been the more long-term consequences and local effects. This is the general perspective that brought the authors of this volume together.

Biopolitics and national identities: between liberalism and totalization

The common denominator for this cluster of three articles is an exploration of the nexus between biopolitics and national identities. Of course, biopolitics is just one possible conceptual approach to the study of nationalism and nation-building; yet, as this collection of papers demonstrates, it might be instrumental for uncovering certain aspects of national identities that are not visible from other research perspectives. What biopolitics can tell us is that national identity making necessarily implies disciplinary practices of controlling and regulating human lives as a precondition for aggregating a population into a single collective body. The concept of biopolitics might help us to grasp the political as “something that occurs when bodies come together and relate to one another” (Puumala 2013, 952). Biopolitical theorizing is particularly illuminating for studying identities in flux and national narratives in a state of transformation that need some anchoring and fixing in nodal points beyond traditional ideological divides. The application of biopolitical instruments usually serves to stabilize the dispersed identities through grounding them in bodily discourses concerned with managing lives through nutrition, medicine, reproductive behavior, demographic policies, food security, and so forth. Despite their seeming ideological neutrality, these issues might easily turn into manipulative tools by the state and, contrary to initial expectations, produce strong ideological impulses. The three articles collected in this cluster claim, from very different research perspectives, that biopolitical instruments of power are indispensable components of discourses and practices of making and shaping national identities, whether they be exemplified by cultural production in the fashion industry, by practices of inclusion or exclusion of outsiders such as refugees, or by newly contrived ideologies of biopolitical conservatism with evident imperial tones in places such as Russia. In these and other cases, biopolitics is used as an analytical tool to detect and discern a strong totalizing platform for national identity-building projects, including practices of exclusion (Oliwniak 2011, 51) that do not necessarily fit in the liberal understanding of politics. Originally, biopolitics was understood as a concept denoting a peculiar mode of making collective identities (communities) through “normalization,” that is to say, hegemonic struggles over producing an understanding of what body-related practices of population management ought to be considered as consensually accepted and welcomed, and what can be contested and bracketed off as detrimental for body politic. In this sense, biopolitics

Entertain and Govern: From Sochi 2014 to FIFA 2018

The article looks at Russia’s international sports politics from two different perspectives. The authors discuss sport mega-events as instruments of legitimizing the existing regime and stabilizing its foundations. They argue that, due to mega-events, the Russian state has found itself under persistent external pressures from international organizations, and has had to react to them and adjust its legal norms and policy practices accordingly. The key argument of the article is that both elements of the puzzle can be approached as central elements of governmentality.

Illiberal geographies: popular geopolitics and Russian biopolitical regionalism

Abstract In this article, we focus on how a variety of illiberal discourses construct a scene for new geopolitical and geocultural imageries of the post-Soviet space, Europe, and Eurasia. Academically, our approach falls into disciplinary niches known as popular geopolitics (when it comes to territories) and biopolitics (when it comes to people). More specifically, we try to see how Russian artistic personalities and public intellectuals contribute to the re-imagination of the post-Soviet space along the lines of Russian illiberal – and largely anti-Western – thinking. Among our protagonists are Valery Gergiev, Iosif Kobzon, Yulia Chicherina, Gleb Kornilov, Ivan Okhlobystin, and Zakhar Prilepin. All of them are important cultural figures who produce cultural justifications for imperial foreign policy in general, and Russia’s annexation of Crimea and de facto occupation of Donbas in particular. Our main argument is that the illiberal imagery of the post-Soviet world drastically reduces the validity of the major pillars of international society, such as state territorial borders, national jurisdictions, citizenship, and legal obligations and commitments. Instead of the rule of law Russian performative illiberalism puts a premium on a series of loosely defined yet foundational for this type of imagery concepts such as patriotism, national spirit and pride, and “natural,” “organic” bonds defining the sense of belonging to Russia as a trans-border political community.

From Sochi – 2014 to FIFA – 2018: a fading sovereignty?

Abstract In this article, we uncover the dynamics and the evolution of Russian discourses of sovereignty before and after the Sochi 2014 Olympic Games using some elements of Foucauldian methodology and constructivist reading of sovereignty as an institution. We argue that there is a discrepancy between the rhetoric of sovereign power and the institutional practices in which it is embedded. It leads us to theorize that sovereignty discourses are contextual, unstable and constitutively shaped by commitments taken as key elements of international socialization. In the case of Russia, these discourses can be divided into three groups: pre-Sochi, post-Sochi and pre-World 2018 Cup discursive formations. As we venture to demonstrate, Putins model of sovereignty is in crisis, yet it has support, both domestic and international. In the near future, sport is likely to remain one of those spheres of high visibility where the ideology of surviving under sanctions and counter-attacking the West will be reified.

Shaping the Estonian: National Identity in Films, Arts and Song

The chapter seeks to uncover how Estonia after the 1990s defines itself through films, contemporary art and the Song and Dance Festival. I particularly focus on these three spheres of national cultural production as containing different but meaningful narratives of Estonianness, created within society and by discourses that are both hegemonic and critical. Arguably, none of the areas is homogeneous, and they have been transformed in the past two decades. What is more or less common in these understandings of the nature of Estonian nationalism is the grounding in the experience of “triple colonisation” (Baltic German, Tsarist Russian, and Soviet) (Peiker 2016, 114). It is a variety of interpretations of the Soviet past and relations with the Russophone population that continues to be an unalterable “stumbling stone” for both types of discourse, uncovering their inner ruptures and challenging their consistency.