Ukraine and the Big Moral Divide: What Biased Media Coverage Means to East European Borders

ABSTRACT

Geopolitical shifts and the changing significance of borders in the EU’s neighbourhood are usually understood as a matter of international power politics. Factors that accompany geopolitical impact on borders, such as media coverage of geopolitical change, often appear as secondary or irrelevant. However the recent Ukraine conflict revealed the contrary as pro-EU attitudes were strongly supported by ‘western’ media. Therefore this paper seeks to clarify the role of news media in creating perspectives and attitudes on geopolitical shifts and the significance of European borders. Empirical evidence on the coverage of the evolving Ukraine crisis by German news sources portrays the media as promoters of biased framings and imaginaries which suggest that the EU be a potential conflict party in the newly evolving geostrategic confrontation in its eastern neighbourhood. The findings indicate that during critical periods of the Ukraine crisis media reports combined rising euphoria about Europe and ‘the West’, as defenders of the ‘good cause’, with excessive moral polarising and the discursive normalisation of a rhetoric of escalation. Imaginaries of a bipolar world (The West against Russia) and a new Cold War prepared the ground for a new understanding of European borders and neighbourhood relations as being manipulable at will.     

The Multiscalar Production of Borders

The present geopolitical situation has made the debate on borders and their functions, significance, and symbolism more prominent than at any time since the end of the Cold War. While the various processes of globalisation have challenged the traditional border concept, the scalar model of identity and society remains primarily anchored in national space. The understanding of the state as a multiscalar construction, constantly negotiated and reconfigured by its actors at different levels, allows us to broaden the scope of our analysis and rethink and transform the spatial formations previously taken for granted in assessing the impacts of globalisation more regionally. State borders continue to have considerable relevance today, yet as the articles brought together in this special section will demonstrate, borders must be understood as complex, multiscalar, multidimensional, yet dynamic entities that have different symbolic and material forms, functions, and locations. With examples from Europe, Southeast Asia and the global south, this section aims to advance our knowledge of the multiscalar dynamics of border politics. The articles investigate how borders are negotiated vis-à-vis questions of identity, belonging, political conflict, and societal transformation, and how they are re- and deconstructed through various institutional and discursive practices at different levels and by different actors.     

Modeling System Complexity in the Context of Geopolitics Related to Climate Change

Due mainly to the evolution of science and technology, ontic systems have continuously become more complex. Thus, original institutional economics has adopted and advanced the concepts of complex systems. This article further develops complexity concepts and relates them to problems of climate change. Systems complexity is combined with concepts from geopolitics in order to introduce geopolitical analysis about boundaries/borders into complex systems. The addition of geopolitical ideas allows for systems to focus on a designated social and ecological context that fits the problem of interest. The social and ecological components of open geopolitical systems lead to processes that are dynamic and complex. Thus, complex-systems modeling needs the assistance of geopolitical concepts and geopolitical models need to be embedded in complex systems. Each section of the article clarifies its meaning with examples of climate change concerns.     

Leave the Lemons at Home: Towards a Political Ecology of Border Space

This paper presents a political ecology approach to the study of borders through consideration of a lemon's travels in contemporary North American border space. Following discussion of recent work on the dynamic, multi-scalar, and process-based character of modern borders, I suggest that such critical approaches could be usefully augmented by drawing on ideas about socio-material networks advanced by Bruno Latour. By adopting a political ecology framework, border scholars would be able to consider more fully the materiality of borders and bordering processes. Through the example of the lemon, I demonstrate that in constructing the fruit as a particular socio-material artifact that embodies multiple threats to US national space, it and its carrier become implicated in the regulation of political-economic and geopolitical networks that are seemingly far removed from the object of concern.     

Bridging the Divide: Middle Eastern Walls and Fences and the Spatial Governance of Problem Populations

Building on a long history of spatial control through walling in the region, walls and fences have been built in the Middle East in recent years to undertake a range of practices. Gated communities, residential and security compounds, anti-migrant walls, separation barriers and counter-insurgency fences can all be found in the Middle East. These walls address and govern problems that take the population as their subject. These walls all share a common frame of viewing the populations they work to govern as ‘problematic’ in multiple ways. This paper explores how walls have been and continue to be used in governing populations through mobility and incorporating a combination of disciplinary and biopolitical techniques through a range of spatial and territorial repertoires. As such it works to bridge the divide in border studies and critical security studies between geopolitical/topographical and biopolitical/topological approaches to borders and governance.     

From Sovereignty to Imperium: Borders,Frontiers and the Specter of Neo-Imperialism

Borders are changing in myriad and multifaceted ways. After 9/11, states redoubled efforts at shoring up their perimeters and building walls. But borders are not merely increasingly securitized, they are also becoming thicker and bi-national. This new ‘zonal’ border emerging worldwide radically shifts the debate about borders and sovereignty. If sovereignty is indivisible, unitary and final, how can it be shared between states at their mutual perimeters? Is this really evidence of sovereignty waning? In this article, I suggest we are stuck at this conceptual impasse because of two conflations. The first one involves two aspects of sovereignty: authority and control. Looking at borders as thin jurisdictional lines, we observe only their legal authority (de jure); instead, by examining changing modes of control, we can see how new securitized borders actually reinforce state strength. The second conflation revolves around the conceptual linking of borders, states and sovereignty. This article argues that as borders thicken, they start to resemble frontiers, and sovereignty starts to resemble imperium – a Roman designation for political authority that is territorially unbounded. This disrupts the border/state dyad and situates borders (lines) and frontiers (zones) on a continuum. In doing so, it reveals how sovereignty is not waning, but changing shape – a worrisome geopolitical conclusion given the possibilities of neo-Imperialism due to power asymmetries between neighbouring states.     

Bordering the Eastern Himalaya: Boundaries,Passes, Power Contestations

National borders in the eastern Himalaya region exhibit pressures of modernisation transition between two powerful emerging nation-states. The research question concerns under what circumstances borders are maintained. Consideration falls on the role of physical features, borders as cultural identity markers, and passes as transgressive spaces, negotiated through historical shifts in population and politics. A geopolitical history of boundary contestations in this region indicates the role of passes as conduits of political and cultural flows. Power relations bound space that cultural preservation makes worth delimiting.     

Resiliency or Change? The Contemporary Canada—US Border

The developed states of North America have not experienced transnational integration to the same degree as those of the European Union. Indeed, some scholars have argued that North American States and the border functions which define their territorial limits, are essentially unchanged in the face of globalisation, hardening rather than softening, and remaining unabashedly archaic and state-centred. This article suggests that although there has been considerable change in the border functions and geopolitical discourses which mediate transnationalism among the highly developed North American states – namely Canada and the United States – the nature and structure of transnational integration has remained more limited than that of the EU. It argues that the reasons for this more limited international integration agenda lie in the specific geopolitical discourses which sustain cross-border institutions and national identity before and after 11 September 2001 (‘9/11’). The Canadian state, for example, has demonstrated considerable resistance to greater levels of integration with the United States, at the same time that it has became increasingly open to cross-border trade under NAFTA. This resistance is based upon a national-identity discourse that relies upon distancing the Canadian state from its larger neighbours to the south. At the same time, however, the national security discourse which has emerged in the Canada and the United States following from 9/11, has failed to close borders to increasing levels of economic integration, and must accommodate the need for a degree of openness to the heightened levels of cross-border trade under NAFTA. As a result, there has been considerable reorganisation and reorientation of borders within North America. It is simply inaccurate to view the continent as a place where borders have remained unyielding to the broader forces of globalisation. If the role of borders in maintaining security while facilitating trade has resulted in an increased awareness of, and concern with the Canada-US border, the latter is not simply a continuation of ‘old-fashioned state-centred geopolitical concerns’ but is instead a newly-fashionedpost-9/11 response to the ramifications of globalised trade and terrorism.     

Geopolitics of the Cosmopolis

Through an analysis of a speech held by Finnish Minister of Defence Jyri Häkämies at CSIS in Washington in 2007, the article scrutinizes the new emergence of “geopolitics” in international politics. Although its novelty is debatable, in this new geopolitical discourse the main focus is not related to the spatial borders of a nation state but instead to securing territory beyond these borders. It seems that “common values”, basically undefined but allegedly including such ideas like democracy, are related to this new form of “geopolitics”. In contrast to traditional geopolitics and identity politics, the global or cosmopolitical “us” defending common values seems to be a changing coalition and other countries appear only as objects of its operations. Only Russia, waking from its decade-long hibernation, emerges as a potential challenge to “us”. Curiously enough, its awakening also brings geopolitics back. The analysis of the speech reveals that the “new situation” requires choosing friends and enemies that are not clearly defined in the classical geopolitical sense. Even in the traditional sense of protecting the borders etc., the geopolitical security of Finland is best protected through acting for the geopolitical security of the whole world, no matter where or when that might require our presence. But from where does, for instance, the legitimacy of the operations of “us” derive? In the speech of minister Häkämies, many of the classical themes of political theory reappear, though in a new form. It is guided by geopolitical concerns, but the geopolitics it entails is rather different from the traditional way of thinking about it. This also creates a need to rethink some central concerns of political theory.     

Missing from the Map: Chinese Exceptionalism,Sovereignty Regimes and the Belt Road Initiative

ABSTRACT

Historical and conventional international relations (IR) frameworks describe the Belt Road Initiative (BRI) as representing a newly ambitious Chinese drive into global politics that positions China as moving away from its long-time reticence towards foreign entanglements. This raises a contradiction of China being at one and the same time both a defender of its own territorial sovereignty while also being engaged in various projects, particularly the BRI and the associated Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), that point in completely different directions. This paper seeks to build upon and move beyond conventional framings to understand how the BRI represents a conflict over the workings of state sovereignty that such frameworks have trouble addressing. We argue that the absence of an official Chinese government BRI map promotes a ‘useful fuzziness’ with regards to China being open to crafting a new as of yet undefined geopolitical identity. In light of the absence of such a map, this work considers key ideas relating to China’s geopolitical expansion via the BRI in terms of so-called sovereignty regimes – the idea that various practices of authority and control emanating originally from states take different geographical shapes. Conflicts arise when a state, such as China, finds itself caught between the operational imperatives of multiple regimes. By identifying the current sovereignty dynamics raised by the BRI in light of the relevant, yet distinctive historical experience of the Marshall Plan, this work can be used as a model for understanding how China’s current leadership is managing the debate of simultaneously protecting ‘strong borders’ yet also promoting a policy of ‘going out’.     

A Geopolitical Analysis of Popular Songs in the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, 1983–2013

Based on the notions of ‘popular geopolitics’ and ‘practical geopolitics’, this article explores how China’s geopolitical strategies are represented and reproduced by the popular songs in the CCTV (China Central Television) Spring Festival Gala during the past thirty years (1983–2013). Drawing on the (con)textual and visual analysis of 539 popular songs, how geopolitical knowledges are represented and reproduced by these songs and how these songs are involved with China’s geopolitical strategies are analysed. The main argument of this article indicates that the official regulated popular songs in the annual Gala can be considered as important constitutions of China’s state apparatus which aim at propagandising and legitimating the official geopolitical strategies on both internal and international affairs. As research of the geopolitical engagements of China’s popular music, this article might also be read as a contribution to wider literatures on popular and practical geopolitics from a non-Western perspective.     

Geopolitics of the Northern Dimension: A Critical View on Security Borders

The Cold War geopolitical order has crumbled. As a consequence questions related to security, borders and identity have gained momentum in European politics as well as throughout the world. This article reflects the concept of security border both in the light of critical geopolitics and ideas of 'critical security thought', i.e. post-positivist security thinking (critical and postmodern orientations). The post-Cold War era means that the capability of the state to control security political space, and new border transgressing threats, is uncertain. Security borders are therefore becoming ever harder to define and draw. The empirical dimension of the article is the policy and process of creating the European Union's Northern Dimension (ND). The ND process is analysed, and particular attention is paid to the concept and practices of security borders. Critical geopolitics and 'critical security thought' serve as a theoretical framework. They provide a theoretical context and basis for the notion of security border. In this article critical geopolitics and post-positivist security thought constitute both an ontological and epistemological foundation for the study, while the notion of security border functions as an analytical tool for studying the ND. This article claims that the ND is an ambivalent (security) process. Second, it argues that the concept of security border is a useful analytical tool for geopolitical investigation.     

The Use of Intangible Benefits for Promoting Contested Policies: The Case of Geopolitical Benefits and the Israeli Gas Policy

ABSTRACT

The evaluation of many contested projects and policies often includes intangible benefits. Geopolitics represents one type of intangible benefit. Despite a few examples on the use of geopolitics to promote contested projects, there is a gap in the literature on how geopolitical argumentation is constructed for the purpose of promoting resource-based policies. Hence, the aim of this study is to use an Israeli case study to examine how geopolitical constructs are used to promote competing energy policies concerning recent gas discoveries and to provide rudimentary insights on the implications for policy making. It was found that the geopolitical rationale was an appealing rhetorical device for all players as it is both unquantifiable and hence difficult to disprove and is rooted in the Israeli societal context. As a result, coalitions built their own geopolitical rationales, each with its own rhetorical tools. These literary tools were often embedded in narratives of power and geographical language with emotional resonance. Yet, the Israeli case demonstrates that geopolitical constructs come at a detrimental price as they promote censorship and exclusion of the public from the process.     

Diaspora Geopolitics: Romanian-Americans and NATO Expansion

Recent years have witnessed increased interest in diasporas. In the current context of globalisation, diasporas have assumed greater prominence on the international stage. The link between diasporas and international politics, however, is relatively under-studied. The purpose of this study is to analyse the interconnections between diasporas and international politics from a geopolitical perspective. Specifically, I examine the linkages between the US-based Romanian diaspora and US foreign policy regarding Romania during the late 1990s when NATO expanded into Eastern Europe. The US-based Romanian diaspora attempted to influence the US political establishment to grant NATO membership to Romania during NATO’s 1997 expansion by reshaping the prevailing geopolitical discourse about Romania in order to move the borders of ‘sameness’ to include Romania as similar to rather than apart from ‘the West’.     

Cartopolitics,Geopolitics and Boundaries in the Arctic

Critical Border Studies emphasise how distinct political spaces are produced by borders. In this article I suggest that the order of this relationship should be reversed. I argue that space precedes and conditions the manifestation of borders. The argument is based on an understanding of cartography as a practice that mediates the relationship between space and borders. Drawing on Bruno Latour, I introduce the notion of cartopolitics to describe the process where questions pertaining to sovereign control over space are decided through cartography and law. In analysing current border practices in the Arctic, the term cartopolitics captures how the relationship between the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and cartography is shaping the attempts by Arctic states to expand sovereign rights into the sea. The key is the continental shelf and how it is defined in law. In this process cartographic practices work to establish a particular spatial reality that subsequently serve as a basis for border making.     

The ‘Greater Middle East’ as a ‘Modern’ Geopolitical Imagination in American Foreign Policy

This article aims at analysing how the September 11 terrorist attacks have caused the formation of a new geopolitical vision of an area called the ‘Greater Middle East’ and how this formation has led to changes in US foreign policy towards this region. To do that, the article first presents a theoretical background against which the modern geopolitical imagination of the USA is formulated. It considers the links between national traumas/myths, geopolitical codes and visions, and foreign policy actions. The article then applies this analysis to the case of the Greater Middle East with respect to how this imagined geography shapes the foreign and security policy of the USA. It concludes that even though this imagined region has been presented in texts as justifying US-led policies with liberal underpinnings, it has in reality laid the ground for and been used for justifying US extra-territorial intervention in the region.     

The Trans-Political Nature of Southwest China’s Energy Conduit,Yunnan Province

Transboundary flows of energy across Yunnan Province in China and to Southeast Asian states provide insight into the changing nature of borders and border areas. Rather than monolithic symbols of state sovereignty, China’s southwest borders in Yunnan can be more accurately characterised as zones of connectivity and exchange, serving a range of local, national and regional objectives. Energy production and distribution in and across Yunnan can be understood as functioning in a set of dynamic transnational processes that serve as economic and political bridges – increasing interaction and deepening regional integration – while also working to mitigate risk to China’s energy demands. In this article, energy projects in Yunnan and Southeast Asia demonstrate the ways border regions can respond to increasing globalisation, simultaneously strengthening national energy security while promoting regional interconnection and diplomacy. Thus, connections to and through a once peripheral region present an apparent contradiction: once rigid territorial borders are increasingly characterised by transboundary infrastructure development and exchanges of energy, capital and diplomacy, while promoting broader, diversified national energy security objectives – essentially strengthening national security through transnational energy projects. This article investigates how energy development works to shape Yunnan’s role as an “energy conduit,” while advancing both transnational and national geopolitical objectives, and thus, suggesting that these projects can be understood as trans-political in nature.     

The Ephemeral Borders of Revolutionary Spaces

From the Paris Commune to the Red Shirt uprising in Bangkok, revolutionaries lacking the power to overthrow their states or depose unpopular politicians have captured parts of major cities and formed their own temporary enclaves of resistance. These groups create intraurban borders by building barricades, arming themselves, and fighting to protect their space. The borders, while temporary and usually ineffective, are powerful symbols as they separate a sphere of active resistance from territory under state control. While these borders stand, they are challenges to state power – lines marking the limits of what states can control. This essay looks at how these borders arise and how they relate to more familiar types of borders. Revolutionary borders are shaped by many of the same forces as national borders, most notably globalisation, but have a distinct character that is closely linked to the changing geography of urban areas.     

Growth discontinuities at borders

I document the existence of discontinuities in short- and long-term growth rates of satellite-recorded nighttime lights per capita across national borders, with growth rates of nighttime lights increasing abruptly as one crosses a border from a slower-growing country into a faster-growing one. I show that growth discontinuities are not driven by any special set of borders, or by differences in geographic and climatic conditions on the different sides of borders. I investigate multiple explanations for growth discontinuities, including differences in the determinants of growth across borders and differences in the extent to which borders form barriers to flows of goods, capital or people. I present evidence that differences in the quality of the rule of law are consistently helpful in explaining differences in growth between two countries at their border, and conclude that national-level variables such as institutions and policies may have rapid and important effects on growth.