As Alec Murphy (this forum) argues, Russia's invasion of Ukraine highlights the continuing relevance of the modernist territorial imagination – but this should not lead us to adopt simplistic explanations of Russia's actions. Linear geopolitical assumptions about the link between territory and great power behaviour continue to dominate Western debates about the invasion and underpin an excessive focus on Russian national security perceptions and the role of NATO (e.g. Mearsheimer, 2022; for a more critical perspective see Megoran, this forum). Ironically, such a focus fails to capture the full significance of the modernist territorial imagination in this war. As has been pointed out, foregrounding NATO cannot account for the role of Ukrainian agency (see Vorbrugg and Bluwstein, this forum). But it also brushes over the complex entanglement of spatial and statist imaginaries that exist on the Russian side, with implications not only for the ongoing debate about the reasons for the invasion but also for predictions about possible outcomes of the war. We need to pay more attention to variants of modernist territorial imaginaries, especially when moving beyond the ‘core West’ of Europe and the US – while also acknowledging that these imaginaries continue to have wide emotional appeal and are not simply a residual of the way the international system operates (Penrose, 2002).

In this I argue, with Stuart Elden and others, for an understanding of ‘territory as a process, not an outcome, (…) continually made and remade’ (Elden, 2013, p. 35; cf. also Jackman et al., 2020). This does not mean that we should leave (nation-)statism behind when thinking about territory, but that we need to pay attention to the specifics of statist and spatial imaginaries and the way they co-produce geopolitical contexts. The invasion is both motivated by modernist territorial imaginaries and already changing them, including in an apparent re-territorialization of ‘Russia’ whose ultimate significance is not yet clear. Great power-ness (derzhavnost’) in current Kremlin discourse and practices is best understood as part of the visceral political affect of nationalism. To the Kremlin, Ukraine's relationship with NATO matters primarily for its affective and symbolic value, a geopolitics of identity that is co-produced at different scales between Russia, Ukraine and the West. Ultimately, what may be at stake is not so much Russian national security but regime security and the surprisingly fragile domestic (self-)legitimation of the Kremlin, which in recent years has increasingly relied on a set of narratives and conspiracy theories based on spatial imaginaries that resonate with ordinary Russians (Ortmann, 2017; Greene, 2022).

Andreas Antoniades and Stefanie Ortmann remind us that Russia’s war in Ukraine has set in motion broader systemic dynamics that the world will need answers for regardless of the conflict's hoped for end.

This article critically engages with the hierarchical binary between theory and area research in the study of international politics. We pose questions about the processes which construct and reaffirm the theory/area distinction in IR and show that the binary creates structural pressures and reinscribes hierarchies for individual scholars. We notice that IR’s Euro/West-centrism is directly linked to and perpetuated by the divide that privileges IR theorising over empirical research both on and from places outside of the West. We show how this divide has been institutionalised with the effect of producing separate but intertwined academic fields of ‘IR’ and ‘Area Studies’. The hitherto voiced calls to overcome the divide have largely focused on the question of how to give more weight to knowledge produced about the ‘non-West’ in IR. This, we argue, overlooks the broader significance of the theory/area divide, which lies in the socio-instructional structures maintaining it and the concrete effects they have on researchers from the ‘peripheries’. This article, therefore, aims to examine the construction of Area Studies’ peripherality and to rethink possible solutions. To better illustrate the intersection of epistemic politics and political economy of knowledge production, we highlight the experience of researchers from the Global East.

However compelling the narrative of a ‘return of spheres of influence’ appears, it is both empirically limited and normatively problematic. The concept evokes assumptions about a world dominated by Great Powers, but also an ontology of space as fixed, bounded territory under the exclusive control of a powerful state actor. It denies local agency in depicting spheres of influence as territory that is essentially passive and empty, fought over by outside actors. These assumptions are misleading, unable to capture the complex entanglements of relations and processes that co-produce state, space and power at the present global juncture. They produce much more fluid spatialities, the result of both historical legacies and the transformation of state power over the past few decades. This is visible in Russia’s relations with the former Soviet Union, where forms of Russian power are ill-described by the ontological assumptions of ‘spheres of influence’.

Der russische Einfluss in Kirgistan wird viel zu oft durch die Linse traditioneller geopolitischer Konzepte analysiert. Dies führt dazu, dass die Erfahrungen der kirgisischen Bevölkerung und die Eigenschaften kir-gisischer Staatlichkeit ignoriert werden und damit ein wichtiger Teil des russischen Einflusses übersehen wird. Die Autorin zeigt in ihrer Analyse, wie gefühlte Nähe in Verbindung mit einem gemeinsamen Staats-mythos russische Macht in Kirgistan aufrechterhält, und diskutiert Reichweite und Grenzen russischer »ver-führerischer Macht

Geopolitics and grand strategy are modern concepts of statecraft associated with the rise and decline of Great Powers. This chapter looks at the concept of geopolitics and its significance for grand strategy. It does so by tracing the development of the concepts and showing how the meaning of the concepts evolved in response to changing world historical contexts. It explains why geopolitics and grand strategy are associated with the politics of Great Powers and why these concepts are currently making a comeback. The chapter then goes on to discuss the pitfalls and problems associated with formulating a grand strategy, and why geopolitics is as much about interpretation as it is about objective geographical factors.

This article questions the analytical value of “spheres of influence” for understanding power and the state in the post-Soviet region and beyond, based on a critical deconstruction of the ontological and epistemological assumptions inherent in the concept. It proposes an alternative reading of power and the state, drawing on the concept of “seductive power” at a distance and Timothy Mitchell’s “state effect.” Rather than the concept of a sphere of influence, a highly politicized concept that conveys an ontology that flattens and divides space, essentializes the state, and relies on an intentionalist account of power, we need an analytical framework that can help us make sense of the multiple, varied spatialities and historical legacies that produce the state and power. I demonstrate this through an extended discussion of Russian power in Kyrgyzstan, a country often described as a Russian client state. Mobilizing recent re-conceptualizations of state and power in anthropology and political geography, I present an analysis of Russia’s seductive power in Kyrgyzstan and the way it contributes to producing Kyrgyz state-ness. I also show how Russia’s Great Power myth is itself evolving and conclude that the differentiated, relational production of space and power in either Kyrgyz or Russian myths of the state is not captured by a the concept of a return to spheres of influence.

Despite the ubiquity of conspiracy theories in the former Soviet Union, there is an almost total lack of systematic research on the issue. The relative absence of writing about conspiracy theories in Russia and the former Soviet Union is noteworthy as, since the Tsarist era, conspiracy theories have found fertile ground across the Russian empire and indeed the Soviet Union, and they continue to abound during in the post-Soviet space. Perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to say that anyone recently doing social science or humanities research on the region will have come across conspiracy theories as a form of historical analysis or artistic expression, as has recently been explored with regard to the novels of Andrei Pelevin. The phenomenon seems to operate in fictional and nonfictional accounts both on the level of popular narratives and, in the case of Russia and some regional governments, in the official discourses of state power. Some of the reasons for the rise in popularity of conspiracy theories in the post-Soviet era will be explored below. In fact, this introductory article serves a dual purpose: both to discuss the theoretical implications of analyzing conspiracy theories in the post-Soviet space and to sketch out a research agenda for what is a largely unexplored field. The latter demands that we attend to questions of what might be specific and especially significant about conspiracy theories in the post-Soviet space, and how the post-Soviet type adds to the emergence of a field of conspiracy theory studies which seeks to understand this apparently increasingly prominent feature of the post-modern world

The coloured revolutions, including the Tulip Revolution, have exerted influences on Russian self-representations. At the same time, Russian self-identifications provided the framework within which meaning was attributed to the colour revolutions - they shaped the way in which the 'wave', and the Tulip Revolution within it, was framed. In general, the Tulip Revolution did not have the same resonance in Russian public discourse as the Rose, and in particular, Orange Revolutions, mostly because Ukraine had a place in Russian self-representations that Kyrgyzstan did not. Nevertheless, it crucially enabled a reading of the 'wave' as a wave of disorder and extremism, something that again resonated with Russian self-representations, as it re-confirmed a discourse of 'Russia in danger' that has persisted in Russian self-representations since 1991.