Vera Smirnova, K-State

I am a political geographer with research interests at the intersection of geopolitics and land governance. My research, broadly, focuses on how land becomes a strategic instrument of statecraft and a site where infrastructural and geopolitical power is produced and contested. I am particularly interested in how legal regimes of land tenure, cadastral systems, land registries, and modes of land governance are mobilized to reconfigure territorial control - undermining or reinforcing territorial sovereignty of states. I use Russia as the main theory-generating case for comparative politics across the broader Eurasian region.

I am originally from a Soviet mono-industrial town in the Russian North. Since completing my Ph.D. at the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at Russia's leading liberal university, the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow, where I collaborated with colleagues at the Cardiff University School of Geography and Planning, in the UK. Currently, I work as an assistant professor in the Departments of Geography and Political Science at Kansas State University, and as an ajunct researcher at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas.

My work appeared in geography and political science journals, including Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Global Studies Quarterly and Geoforum among others. I am an active member of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the American Association of Geographers, where I chaired the Eurasian Geography Specialty Group (2024-2026).