Eurasia 2.0: Russian Geopolitics in the Age of New Media ed. by Mikhail Suslov, Mark Bassin (review)

While there is now an extensive literature examining the reemergence of Eurasianist geopolitical thinking in Russia, this volume is innovative in seeking to consider such thinking in the context of digitally networked communications technologies and under conditions of “information warfare.” Bringing together an international group of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, it offers a wide-ranging exploration of shifts in Russian geopolitical sensibility, thought, and practice in relation to the proliferation of online and visual media.

The substantive content of the book is composed of an introduction by the editors plus fifteen analytical chapters, contributed by a mix of established and early career scholars. The book is divided into five thematic sections, covering: geopolitical sensibilities; geopolitical ideologies; visions of Russia as a great power; post-Soviet geopolitics and the media; and popular geopolitics. As these titles suggest, the book brings together cultural and political analysis in a way that reflects the emergence of “critical geopolitics” as a distinct approach to the field that is concerned with the deconstruction of ideologies, discourses, and representations (in keeping with recent developments, some chapters usefully go beyond this to consider questions of affect, emotion, and performativity). The introduction contextualizes the main themes of the volume, providing a rapid but highly effective summary of the history of geopolitics as a perspective on the world and the revival of geopolitical thinking in post-Soviet Russia, and an overview of how a digital geopolitics has started to emerge.

The subsequent chapters can be grouped into three broad categories. In the first, such as the chapters on how the idea of Eurasia surfaces in the writings of figures associated with the Izborsky Club (Andrei Tsygankov) and in the work of the Islamist, pro-Nazi thinker Geidar Dzhemal (Marlene Laruelle), and on the idea of Russia as a Great Power (Hannah Smith), the emphasis is primarily on key ideas, texts, and schools of thought, rather than the ways in which they are manifested online. A second group of chapters (including Birgit Beumers on the motif of the road in Russian cinema and Dirk Uffelman on geolinguistic maps of Ukraine) engage with online and visual materials, primarily at the level of textuality, in order to examine their spatial presuppositions and symbolism. While, again, revealing of the broad range of ways in which geopolitical sensibilities and imaginations are constituted, and thus useful in establishing a sense of the parameters and substance of debates concerning Eurasian and Russian geopolitics, the cinematic or digital condition of the texts under consideration does not generally form a focal point of analysis.

In the third category are chapters that present a more integrated analysis of geopolitics, media, and online technologies, and that thereby deliver most fully on the aims of the volume overall. Galina Zvereva’s account of digital storytelling and the expression of regional identities on YouTube throws light on a number of fascinating developments, including the articulation of ideas for new political entities within the Russian Federation since the emergence of putative popular republics in eastern Ukraine. The chapter also documents how long-standing debates over Siberian autonomy, independence, and federalization have developed online. Two contributions present analysis of how the idea of the Russkii Mir (or ethnic Russian world) has circulated and been contested online, in relation to the Ukraine crisis (Mikhail Suslov) and Belarusian identity (Ryhor Nizhnikau), and another pair of chapters consider how the information war surrounding the Euromaidan events (Greg Simons) and the Ukraine crisis more generally (Alla Marchenko and Sergiy Kurbatov) has been expressed on social media. In a standout contribution, Vlad Strukov offers an excellent discussion of the career and online presence of RT editor in chief Margarita Simonian that is conceptually and methodologically sophisticated, and that captures the ways in which “second tier” ideologists enact and disseminate patriotic ideas by hybridizing “old” and “new” media strategies with embodied performance. The chapter...