Infrastructures of Occupation II: Apparatuses of *russian (Re)coloniality

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Infrastructures of Occupation II: ideologies & ecologies

How has russian & soviet power sought to entrench itself on territories which it has occupied or annexed? This panel series deploys “infrastructure” as a heuristic to encompass multiple tools and strategies–martial, architectural, technological, ecological, aesthetic, socio-cultural, demographic, eugenic, legal, fiscal, cadastral–put to use by russian coloniality on the lands of others. It seeks to catalogue, compare and comprehend the impacts these varied (re)colonial infrastructures exert on territories, populations and environments subjected to them (laid to waste, terraformed, de/re-populated, socially engineered, disfigured, “reconstructed”). Can we identify meaningful infrastructural specificities of russian, soviet and post-soviet coloniality–and of resistance to it–across spatial, temporal and systemic contexts?

In thinking (critically) about russia’s (re)coloniality, we encounter an unsettling contradiction: the extent to which post-soviet russia attempts to marry ideologies and technologies of revanchism and neo-imperialism with grotesque claims to de–coloniality and anti-imperialism. Is this dialectic between de- and re-colonality a stable feature of russian empire-building? How does this contradiction manifest itself not only ideologically, but also through the multiple infrastructures through which empire expands and contracts, subjugates–and succumbs to resistance.

*Note: russia is written with a small “r” above to signal an activist stance towards the illegitimacy of the present-day russian federation as a political entity; and to mark the commitment of participants to the dismantlement of its infrastructures of violence and subjugation.

This panel belongs to a double series: "Infrastructures of Occupation" and "Infrastructures of Liberation"

Sub Unit

• Geography, Urban Studies, Built Environments

Chair

• Michał Murawski, U College London (UK)

Papers

• Dark Skies: The Political Ecology of the Baikonur Cosmodrome - Makar Tereshin, U College London (UK)

• Langston Hughes in Chirchiq: A Model Soviet Town in Socialist Uzbekistan - Da Hyung Jeong, Princeton U

• New Hideouts for an Old Fear: Energy and Military Infrastructures in Estonia’s Siberia - Francisco Martínez, University of Murcia, Spain

Discussant

• Victoria Donovan, U of St Andrews (UK)