Vera Smirnova
Territorial governance | Geopolitics | Land tenure and property regimes | Russia
Land Grabbing as a Territorial Practice: National Security Concerns in Large-Scale Land Acquisitions
My current project examines how large-scale foreign land acquisitions reshape territorial governance and challenge sovereign authority, prompting national security responses. While the economic and social dimensions of land grabbing are well documented, this project shifts attention to its political effects: we look into how foreign land control is framed as a challenge to sovereignty and under what specific conditions land governance becomes incorporated into formal national security strategies.
Focusing on Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia – areas characterized by fragmented land tenure and unresolved sovereignty claims carried over from the Soviet period, we analyze cross-country variation in state responses to foreign direct investments in farmland. With that, we aim to understand how security concerns are articulated by local actors and how national identities and public attitudes towards land and foreign ownership shape policy responses.
Statecraft Through Land: Land Abandonment and Land Tenure as Infrastructural State Capacity
This project further examines the geopolitical implications of land governance with a particular focus on land tenure - or who can control, own, and manage land - as a form of infrastructural state power. Drawing from legal geography, I explore recent shifts in property regimes and land legislation within Russia and analyze how these legal frameworks are extended, adapted, and enforced across occupied Ukrainian territories. The goal of this project is to better understand how bureaucratic instruments of land governance overlap with processes of territorial occupation, statecraft, and at the same time the dissolution of territorial sovereignty.
Papers resulting from this project trace the operations of the Russian land surveying institutions to aid the processes of statecraft by addressing issues of land abandonment at home, while at the same time extending those instruments and novel legal frameworks to render territorial occupation legible.
Territory and Territoriality in the History of Russian Political and Geographic Thought
This theoretical project engages with the history of political and geographic thought to rethink conventional political-geographic understandings of territory by examining the concept from Russian intellectual and political perspectives. 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.
My work under this umbrella maps the "more-than-state ontologies of territory" and traces them through contemporary geopolitical developments across the country. In addition, I touch on how the discipline of "area studies" from the Russian standpoint nurtured and structured these meta-geographies through its engagement with and the analysis of the Third World.