Shannon O’Lear

The geopolitics of Russia's annexation of Crimea: narratives, identity, silences, and energy

This article analyzes official Russian government narratives for the annexation of Crimea and connects these narratives of identity and territory to the energy implications and narratives of Black Sea resources and the recent 30-year gas agreement with China. We argue that the events of Crimea’s annexation in the “west” signal a Russian shift “eastward.” With the occurrence of the Euromaidan protest movement and Ukraine’s president, fleeing from power, a pro-European Union government came to power in Kyiv. The Russian government reacted by deploying unmarked troops to support the holding of a secessionist referendum for the peninsula’s population. The Russian government incorporated Crimea by engaging in a sophisticated effort, through nonmilitary and military means, to promulgate narratives justifying Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The Russian government appealed to Russia’s geopolitical and historical imaginations of Crimea. There were two other, no less important, factors for annexing Crimea: control of the Russian Black Sea Fleet based in Crimea and new maritime territorial claims that encompassed much of Ukraine’s Black Sea energy potential and existing facilities. These two impetuses form the silent connection between Crimea, energy, and the Black Sea Fleet, that are then linked to the subsequent gas deal with China. The important gas agreement follows the discursive arc begun in Crimea, which appealed to the historical past, whereas economic developments in Asia and Russia’s energy power status discursively represent Russia’s future. Viewing Russia’s geopolitical narratives in the context of historical and geographical dilemmas shows the layered relationships informing identity, territory, and resources.

Russians in Estonia: Is Narva the next Crimea?

Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and involvement in Ukrainian border regions pose serious consequences and questions. The precedence of Russian military intervention illustrates the porosity and potential for conflicts in other post-Soviet border regions. The Estonian borderland city of Narva, populated predominantly by Russian-speakers, is one such potential site of tension. Based on preliminary findings and data collected in Narva in 2013, this article provides an overview of citizenship, identity, and geographic affiliation issues among Narva’s Russian-speaking community in an effort to generate insights as to how any Russian overtures and potential intervention might be received in Narva.

Book review: The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

and habitus is the ‘set of embodied dispositions learned through education/participation in a field’ (p. 11). A field, for Bourdieu, is an agonistic concept, structured by struggles over the boundaries of the field and the valuation of different types of capital. The field is hierarchically divided between two poles: the autonomous pole, where actors are most thoroughly determined by the power relations of the field, and the heteronomous pole, where actors are shaped by outside forces (p. 10). Lave, through Bourdieu, also distinguishes between the objective structure of the field, ‘the hierarchical and structured relations among positions’ (p. 11), and the subjective structure of the field, ‘The habitus that agents within the field acquire through participation in it and the dispositions they bring to it’ (p. 11). Rosgen’s success, argues Lave, cannot be explained by his ‘charismatic authority’ (p. 119), by NCD’s ‘correspondence with bureaucratic timelines’ (p. 53), or by simple random chance (p. 3). The debate, moreover, cannot be resolved on substantive grounds, as the scientific data cannot parse each claim and counterclaim, as both sides advance some claims that are plausible while ‘others are unsupported by definitive evidence or just plain wrong’ (p. 77). Rather, armed with her Bourdieusian conceptual framework, Lave explains Rosgen’s success by arguing that the subjective structure created by his approach corresponds with the ‘neoliberalisation of the objective structure within which the stream restoration field is contained’ (p. 12), characterized by three key shifts: the increasing privatization of knowledge claims, the emphasis on applied research to meet market demands, and the creation of metrics to commodify and marketize nature (p. 103). Lave’s argument is conceptually rich, and her synthesis of political ecology and STS through Bourdieu is novel, allowing for a granular analysis of the construction and performance of scientific authority. Nevertheless, I have three main criticisms. First, her insistence on tracing political economic ‘influences on’ science risk missing how political economy and science are co-constituted. Second, the book is almost devoid of normative argumentation; Lave outlines the positions of Rosgen supporters and detractors in the ‘Rosgen Wars’, but her political position is never fully articulated. Third, the book is written in accessible and lively language, an impressive feat; however, while I think this is accomplished successfully for the most part, some of the more jocular images occasionally seem out of place. Fields and Streams demonstrates the potential benefits, and difficulties, in doing political ecology with a dual focus on the ‘political’ and the ‘ecological’. Lave’s book is a novel contribution to the field, and can serve as both an accessible introduction for the novice and a thought-provoking intervention for the expert.

Response to my critics

Authors should always be so fortunate as to have such thoughtful and stimulating readings of one’s work. What follows: I turn some comments by Renee Anspach, Hugh Gusterson, and Thomas Hughes into invitations to do further research. I then discuss organizational frames in the context of other conceptions of frames. Last, I tackle the difficult issue of taking a stand on the science in Whole World on Fire (Eden, 2004) while claiming to be a thoroughgoing social constructivist.understandings of power beyond economic, military, political, and ideological, we all need to ponder how to think about the processes that are making the future, an increasingly artificial and technological future. Bacon’s promise of science has indeed given at least the small affluent part of humanity that decides on matters of what is made where, dominion over nature. But in the process that part of humanity has been very slow to realize, much less care about, how that mastery of environment produces effects well beyond the scope of what was intended. Power is now about scale indeed and the largest of scales is where we need to focus our attention clearly. But unless we understand much better the connections between many places in our artificial world in the new geological circumstances of our making, one cannot help wonder as to whether the cows in the cover image might not be a metaphor that requires much more of our attention.