Vera Smirnova, K-State

I am a human geographer with research interests at the intersection of territorial governance, land policy, and political geography. My research at large focuses on how land becomes a strategic instrument of statecraft and a site where geopolitical power is produced and contested. I am particularly interested in how legal regimes of land tenure, cadastral systems, and land governance are mobilized to reconfigure territorial control - sometimes undermining territorial sovereignty of states. My current work investigates how large-scale foreign investments in farmland reshape national security responses through land legislation across postsocialist Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, where fragmented property relations and border disputes create pockets of territorial vulnerability. Conceptually, I draw on legal geography and the history of geographic thought to rethink territory not as a fixed “state container,” but as a multi-scalar practice of governance, extending the concept to the scale of a land plot.

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 the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow. 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 has appeared in geography journals, including Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and Geoforum among others. I am active member of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the American Association of Geographers, where I chair the Eurasian Geography Specialty Group.