RESEARCH | Vera Smirnova

I. PROPERTY REGIMES AND 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 work 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, we highlight how land governance is deeply intertwined with national security, especially in territorially contested regions.

II. TERRITORY IN RUSSIAN GEOGRAPHICAL THOUGHT

This work problematizes traditional political-geographic perspectives by re-reading the concept of "territory" from a Russian standpoint. The history of Russian political and geographic thought borrowed from modern Western paradigms, yet offered new political technologies for controlling the land and securing the population, and hence proposed new categories of geographic analysis to legitimize such relations. In the Russian context, territory as a spatial practice of power-making takes complex political forms, operates on multiple spatial scales, and presupposes different political projects that diverge from modern Eurocentric interpretations. This project maps the "more-than-state ontologies of territory" in Russian political geography and draws connections between theoretical trends and current events in Russia's geopolitical space.