Vera Smirnova
Political geography | Territorial governance | Land tenure and property regimes | Russia

GEOPOLITICS OF LAND GRABS​​

This project examines how large-scale foreign land acquisitions reshape territorial governance and challenge state sovereignty, prompting national security responses. While the economic and social dimensions of land grabbing are well documented, this research addresses how such acquisitions affect sovereign authority and how states respond to security threats through land legislation. Focusing on Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia – regions characterized by fragmented land tenure, unresolved sovereignty claims, and complex geopolitical dynamics, this project will analyze how land governance becomes a key instrument of national security, especially in territorially contested regions. The pilot study for this project is due to start in the summer of 2026.

 

LAND GOVERNANCE IN STATECRAFT

This project examines the geopolitical implications of land governance with a particular focus on land tenure. I explore recent shifts in legal property regimes and land legislation within Russia and how these legal frameworks are extended, adapted, and enforced across occupied Ukrainian territories. The goal of this project is to trace how changes in legal frameworks outlining land tenure (or who can control, own, and manage land) overlap with the processes of territorial occupation. Drawing from the field of legal and political geography, it explores how legal governance of land becomes deeply entangled with territorial control and sovereignty claims. Several papers are currently in review, tracing the operations of the Russian land cadaster and other land surveying institutions within the country and on occupied territories, as well as the workings of this instrument of land governance in calculating and managing land abandonment within the country.

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TERRITORY IN RUSSIAN POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

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This theoretical project engages with the history of geographic thought to rethink conventional political-geographic understandings of territory by examining the concept from a Russian intellectual and political perspective. While borrowing from modern Western conceptions, Russian political geography offered new categories of geographic analysis to legitimize territorial development and occupation. In this context, territory as a spatial practice of governance takes complex political forms, operates on multiple spatial scales, and presupposes different political projects that diverge from modern Eurocentric interpretations. This work maps these "more-than-state ontologies of territory" and connects them to contemporary geopolitical developments in Russia and its wider region. In addition, I touch on how the discipline of "area studies" from within the country nurtured and structured these meta-geographies through its engagement with and analysis of the Third World.