Category Archives: area studies

The End of Area Studies, or a Brand New Beginning?

Leave a reply

The Aleksanteri Institute in conjunction with the University of Helsinki and other funders asked me to take part in a Plenary Roundtable at their annual conference entitled “The End of Area Studies, or a Brand New Beginning?” Tune in here on Wednesday 25 October at 17.00 EEST (one hour ahead of most of Europe)

The discussion will start along the lines of these question from the Chair:

  1. About area studies:  how is the understanding of what we considered as area studies changing? What are the main reasons for this? How do you perceive concepts that emerged lately like a) decolonization of area studies; b) the Global East?  

While many think that the war will bring big changes to Area Studies, I believe the biggest problem is the general defunding of the humanities and the almost preternatural aversion to genuine interdisciplinary studies. These are ‘secular’ (i.e – long-term structural) trends working against holistic models of knowledge production. I am lucky to have worked for most of my professional life in genuinely interdisciplinary departments but this is the exception not the rule. Tellingly, they were always ‘in the shade’ of better funded and respected disciplinary units.

How do I know these are long term problems? Because every year of my professional life I have experienced the threat of defunding, downgrading, or the like. Area Studies was a Cold War child. Does this mean we will ‘benefit’ from the war? Hardly. We can see that expertise best received comes from think-tanks – particularly those embedded in foreign policy networks and the defence establishment.

Regarding decolonization and the related phenomena. Decolonization is (inter alia) a process where we shift focus to the subaltern, or contexualize (or rethink) the centre by focusing on the experience of the periphery. And as I’ve written elsewhere, it is wrong to blame ‘Russian Studies’ for people in the West who support Putin or who do not sufficiently support Ukraine. Some of the best decentering works of scholarship are decades old. The best scholars who continue this shift are those who combine novel (or underused) methods, theories and ‘territories’ to improve understanding. And the key here is that these territories might initially look really familiar. But the best scholars are able to ‘make them strange’ and thereby make us look at them anew.

So, just to take a counterintuitive example, Moscow the global city could be at the heart of a decolonizing agenda – by looking at, for example, the way the subaltern peoples who run its cooking, cleaning and digitized transport systems act upon the urban space in new and solidary ways (obligatory plug for my co-edited book). How, for example, economic and social imperatives in Fergana Valley have a real effect in Moscow and are not just ‘one-way’. This obviously requires a novel method (well, novel to some mainstream scholars in particular disciplines). Theoretically too, while scholars have tended to ‘apply’ or adapt theoretical concepts from the anglophone academy to Russia, a counterprocess which I think will accelerate is the insistence on taking more seriously and giving more space to what some call ‘indigeneity’, others, the ‘idiographic’ and yet others, ‘emicness’. Another area where this has been going on for some time in the area I work on is in sexuality and gender studies. For example in the work on queer identities and looking beyond the ‘global gay’.

As Claudia Snochowska-Gonzalez pointed out long ago, the danger with the ‘levelling’ effect of the call for postcoloniality is that it ceases to be a theory to apply, instead it becomes dogma that actually reinforces a monochrome view of human diversity and striving. Once again, think about the image of the ‘global gay’ as representing subaltern sexualities. In reality he is only made legible if he is actually a safely white, middle-class American-lifestyle gay. The danger is that what Snochowska-Gonzalez calls the ‘hysterical’ mode of postcoloniality reproduces in even starker terms social and cultural divides within a decolonized polity (the example she works with is Poland but it is easily mapped on to any country you wish to choose). Snochowska-Gonzalez warns us well that we risk co-creating neocolonial discourses of eurocentrism and orientalism if we replace the former colonial positioning with our selection of new subalterns within our midst (typically cast as ‘enemies of progress’).

Global East is a tricky one. Numerous people propose this as a recovery term to avoid the problems of ‘PostSoviet’, ‘postsocialism’, ‘Eastern Europe plus or minus’, and ‘Eurasia’. Martin Müller makes a powerful case for Global East to avoid the binary of North-South. It might help replace the Second World, which of course did not actually vanish in 1991 but did quickly disappear from discourse. For him, East is an epistemic space. Müller is absolutely right to see the problem as more than branding, but he inevitably comes up against the problem of self-identity. The war just accelerates the volume of protests from Balts to Bulgarians that they have nothing to do with this ‘East’, however sexy we might want to try to make it sound to students. Müller also notes correctly that the biggest problem is the fact that our geopolitical framing itself is a product of our privileged positioning in the core. The anglophone world produced these artificial ranking (1st-2nd-3rd) divisions, as Madina Tlostanova pointed out long ago. Perhaps the war will reinvigorate the political distinctions used in the Cold War and, ironically the ‘totalitarian’ world will reappear as a highly flawed, yet deployable definition (not least because those aforementioned think-tanks require Washington’s MIC money). I hope not.

I still remain wedded to the now unfashionable term ‘postsocialism’ because it refers to the legacy in social and economic organization of life across vast spaces. And we can (I would add, not too quickly) collectively forget the ‘socialism’ part of it while the ‘post’ has this stubborn habit of remaining visible – whether in the build environment of the microraion, in the prominence of informal economic relations as part of social reproduction, grassroots local civicness, or in so-called ‘paternalistic’ modes of social hierarchy. To me this is a more useful ‘strategic essentialism’ than the one Müller proposes in the ‘Global East’. I accept that I am probably in a minority now.

For Elena Trubina et al., Global East would be a statement about the willingness to decolonize knowledge. It forces us to acknowledge the right of the ‘East’ to be the source of theorizing and producing knowledge about itself, for itself without the ‘approval’ of Western gatekeepers. However, Trubina’s proposal also comes up against the wartime reality – the very people (mobile and international Easterners) who could break the gatekeeping of Westerners are now forced to choose. They can become those very ‘Westerners’ and assimilate to the market in knowledge as it circulates in anglophone (and German and Scandinavian) rich universities, or they can entrench behind the new Cold War curtain.

  • About ethics: what is the role of ethics in an increasingly polarized world, polarized societies and polarized academia?

Hopefully the reader can see that the answer to the question of ethics in the academy is indivisible from the question of who gets to produce knowledge that is read and cited – as the example of the Global East debate shows. Whoever the winner is in the refocus or reorientation of Area Studies this process will produce losers. As I have pessimistically said, if we think of a rebooting of Cold War scholarship then we can see that those who offer enticing tales of missile gaps (perhaps drone gaps now) and ‘mentalities’ might well be net beneficiaries. Especially if they happen to be accessible to our newly minted military industrial managers.

My cynicism aside for a moment, for different audience I was recently asked to reflect on the irony of a situation where there is higher ‘demand’ for all kinds of knowledge about Russia at a time when those producing that knowledge are selected from an increasingly narrow band. Specifically in demand as knowledge producers are those Russian citizen-experts who have left Russia, while those who remain in the country are largely the object of secondary interpretation via polls. Any questioning of the de-facto ban on institutional contact with Russian colleagues is an ethical issue, but one that gets very little attention for obvious reasons. A further irony is the reality that Ukrainian-based scholarly voices are hardly heard in comparison to their Western-based colleagues and public intellectuals.

In the Russian-Western academic community, in reality of course, there are vibrant one-to-one and unofficial contacts, but the mere fact of the ban on institutional contacts with Russia means that the ethical question is even more acute. In many cases Western scholars are using the same fixers and collaborators they have always used, only now they are not even allowed to acknowledge them. As my historian colleague put it me rhetorically: are we to regard dead, historical Russians as valid interlocutors while living ones are off limits? Are we entering a deglobalized community of scholarship and a return to speaking for the others because we deem them unfit to speak for themselves?

Finally, I intentionally say little about Ukraine in this piece, but the performative pressure of Ukraine-based scholars is, in fact, no less than that burden imposed on Russian citizens. I have seen more than once the ‘wrong kind of answer’ from a Ukrainian colleague and the effect it has on how her knowledge is received in ‘the core’.

  • About methodology: What are the challenges to do research in times like this? We are restricted to travel, we have difficulties to access sources, we have grave concerns about the reliability of sources. How does these affect or limit the scholarly gaze, the methodology and the theoretical development?

 I have perhaps a unique insight and interest in this question. But this question is largely covered in the previous answers I’ve given. Indeed, I wrote about this already last year where I discussed how the preexisting problem of extractivist scholarship (where ‘local’ scholars do not get enough credit for their contribution) will likely get worse. Only a minority of active and critical scholars actually left Russia. Many remain and contribute/submit scholarship to their colleagues in the West/do fundamental social, cultural and historical research. The restrictions on travel and collaboration exacerbate existing inequalities of all kinds (think about the difference between Russian citizens with second passports, with money, etc), and of course this affects what scholarship does and does not get published. This situation could last a long time.

For similar reasons there might well be a retreat to core disciplinarity – because of the lack of access, because of political and practical reasons. But this would be a terrible mistake and retrograde step. My own hobbyhorse is about arguing that interdisciplinarity was never really taken very seriously, but is more useful than ever. Think about, for example, the benefit of sociologists of the armed forces working with ‘hard’ war studies people and with economists working on sanctions. I know this already exists, but usually it is not built into the institutional structure of research.

  • About the future of area studies: What are the new approaches or new paradigms taking shape? What is your vision of your field of study? How do we tackle the challenges we now face?    

Area Studies always depended on broader largess from governments and from institutions. I think that despite the war there are tectonic changes in student interests and socialization that mean universities increasingly will not even be willing to argue for the relevance of ‘language-based area studies’. The only hope is in genuine interdisciplinary research institutes which have the respect of the policy community (itself a cliché) and, possibly, better and more flexible pathway provision for undergraduate students. Even in the anglophone world, in conditions of falling enrolments, there is some resistance to actually allowing students to be more omnivorous. Even if language provision is reduced further (which is regrettable but probably inevitable), there is no reason why the model of ‘research institute plus satellite language centre’ cannot serve well into the future.

But of course all this requires intellectual foresight, leadership, courage and maturity to look past the myopic and cyclical decision-making processes in higher education everywhere. In my own university I am lucky enough to work in a Global Studies department which could also serve as an innovative and vibrant model of the future of area studies, but only if barriers to student mobility and research collaboration within the university are reduced.

And that, off the top of my head, is how I’d answer some of these questions. Many more things could be said, given greater or less weight. However, as an Area Studies academic I have a significantly higher teaching workload than many of my disciplinary colleagues and my students are waiting for me.

Provincializing Area Studies of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia in wartime

Leave a reply

I just got back from CBEES conference – a really positive experience for me because I was part of a panel that was mainly about Ukraine and which was able to ‘provincialize’ Russia, and Russo-centric approaches to the war. This is the kind of academic practice that I feel scholars should be engaging with. So for example, while my own work remains focused on Russian society, I learnt a lot about civil society at war, authoritarianism, and activism by listening to my colleagues talk about Belarus and Ukraine.

Provincializing Area Studies is an idea from Dipesh Chakrabarty who made famous the concept of ‘provincializing Europe’. It doesn’t have to be the same thing as ‘decolonizing’, but certainly CBEES was successful in the former. Our own panel was called “Exaggerated Structure, Exalted Agency: What Russian and Ukrainian Studies Failed to See before the Invasion” and was planned and led by young Ukrainian scholars. Ukrainian sociologist Anastasiya Ryabchuk of INALCO Paris and Kyiv-Mohyla started us off with a critical view of International Development work on the frontline in Donbas. Among other questions, she asked: “How to continue fieldwork ethically when as researchers we are mainly in safety?” Some groups will be very much over-researched and others invisibilized and this risks doing more violence. It will also be a challenge to rebuilding solidarity after war given divergent experiences of it.

Finnish researcher Emma Rimpiläinen, now based at Uppsala, has done fieldwork with Russian and Ukrainian speakers in Donbas and elsewhere. Her paper was about knowledge production of the war since 2014 and the divergent experiences among IDPs and others. She was able to tracing different types of explanation for war that people use, depending on their experience and their locality: the geopolitical frame; perspectives on Ukraine’s internal politics; The economic frame about the importance of industry in Donbas; Seeing the conflict through a local elite frame; and finally using tropes of ‘purging’ of particular types of identity. Emma adds a new meta-level perspective on ‘conspiracy thinking’: everyone thinks it is others who are ‘zombified’ by propaganda, it is others who have a ‘vatnik‘, or ‘soviet mentality’. In Emma’s research these claims of zombification have classist overtones.

Denys Gorbach of Sciences Po’s Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics in Paris spoke about the multiple positionings and negotiations of identity that labour activists in E Ukraine use vis-à-vis the now hegemonic ‘national-populist’ position. They both resist and manipulate it to serve their collective struggle for labour rights, for example by leveraging their status as veterans of 2014-15 flighting against Russia. Denys was forthright on the collective narcissism of Ukrainian liberal public sphere in self-mythologizing and how this projects an imaginary unified Ukrainian public. He asks: “What about those who are silenced in the public sphere? How do they relate to the world of the political in a Mouffian sense? In Denys’ view scholars need to challenge the stereotype of ‘apolitical’, ‘slavish’, ‘passive’ – forms of self-orientalizing discourse in East Ukraine when this was place of an immense strike in 2017 and the “fortress of the mobilized workers”. Denys uses a telling turn of phrase that many in Russia would recognize: “the facebook people” to characterize how some Eastern Ukraine unionists view the liberal metropolitan Ukrainians.

Taras Fedirko of Glasgow by way of St Andrews recounted some of his findings about informal and formal organization of armed groups in Ukraine. Once more he challenges the view that conflict and violence can be monolithically grasped. Violence is organised in hybrid ways and the role of nationalist civil society changes under conditions of militarization where once more, there is a divergence in expectations and understandings between ‘civil’ and ‘state’ actors. The nationalist forms do not replace the state, but supplement it resulting in formal-informal coordination in a manner that has long frustrated scholars who labour under a western-centric view of ‘state capacity’ and institution-building.

My paper combined various versions of things I’m writing at the moment. Based on my long-term fieldwork among union organizers and more recent work with socialist and eco-activists I reflected on how the war puts into perspective the nomadism of political activism in Russia and how networks are sustained when they come under different pressures, not least of which is the dispersal of activists away from Russia. Based on Charles Tilly’s use of the ‘catnet’ concept (categoriness = shared ideological framing, and netness = the density of networks). I argue that the ‘experiential entanglement’ of activists is much more ‘elastic’, which should prompt reevaluation of activism as a sociological phenomenon and bring us back to Tilly’s original problematic: what really are common objectives and interests? How to deal with the slippage between ‘collective action’ and ‘collective behaviour’ with regard to political contention?

Finally Volodymyr Artiukh of Oxford took the stage with a high-level analysis and survey of techniques of authoritarian control in Belarus and the new quality of postsocialist authoritarianism. He spoke of the LNR as Belarus’ Guantanamo and the Ryanair hijacking as examples. “Violence works and it is more efficient than we think it is”. Artiukh argues that we need to examine the ‘sociological imagination of reaction’: not casting the war in terms of Russia’s defensive geopolitical considerations based on delusions of elites, but on internal elite reaction that led to aggression. Artiukh’s research makes reference to Steve Reyna – who offered a model on how ‘delusions’ of small elite circle are spread in broader society. First elites talk themselves into war, then inject their delusions into circulating ideologies. ‘Sociological imagination of reaction’ is part of this spreading. This general observation can be extended to the post-socialist context where elites are both rational and irrational, capable of learning, but also burdened with a particular construction of reality. Lukashenka’s Caeserism via passive revolution and preemptive authoritarianism (after Vitaly Silitski) made him the pioneer of authoritarian populism and Putin learned from this. The “Special Military Operation” in his imaginary is exactly that: the suppression of an uprising for countries under ‘Putin’s protection’, hence the attempt to continue the fiction of partial mobilization, and paramilitary action as witnessed in the role, regardless of the reality, imputed to the Vagner Group rather than the Russian Armed Forces, for example.

Our 6-speaker, two part panel was very well attended and audience asked good questions. It was humbling to speak alongside some of the best sociological and anthropological researchers from Ukraine at this time. And also a reminder of why these researchers – now at Oxford, Glasgow, Paris, alongside other Ukrainian researchers, need sustainable sources of support for their work and more than just temporary funding.