Vera Smirnova
Political geography | Land rights and property regimes | Territory and territorialization | Russia

I am a human geographer with research interests at the intersection of political geography, territorial politics, and legal geography. My work explores the relationship between land and power and its various manifestations in post-socialist and authoritarian contexts. In particular, I am interested in understanding how land tenure and other forms of the appropriation of space are enacted, negotiated, and performed through formal and informal technologies of power.

My research examines two modes and spatial configurations of modern politics - property and territory - emphasizing how practices of bordering, registration, and calculation of land (material and imaginary) lead to multiple forms of dispossession at different scales, from the household to the nation. This involves my work on the geopolitics of land grabs, expropriation of land in cases of territorial occupation, land privatization reforms and geopolitical imaginaries in Russia's territorial politics. My general commitment to studying struggles over land is indebted to traditions of Russian spatial sciences that often go unnoticed in recent debates about space and power, coloniality, and territorial control, which tend to draw on predominantly Eurocentric experiences.

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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 in Moscow. I was a recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, the Erasmus Plus mobility grant, the IJURR dissertation writing-up grant, and the Antipode Foundation Institute for the Geographies of Justice travel award.