Near abroad: Putin, the West and the contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus (original) (raw)

2018, International Affairs

During the course of the past decade, Russia has pursued an increasingly proactive and assertive neighborhood policy. Russia has launched military operations against Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014); it has repeatedly meddled in the domestic political affairs of other post-Soviet countries; it has used economic threats and embargoes vis-à-vis neighboring small states; it has established Moscow-led institutions like the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU); and it has expanded its network of military facilities and bases in the post-Soviet space. Against this background, it comes as no surprise that Moscow's regional policy has received much attention from area specialists and international relations scholars. In recent years, a slew of articles and books have been published on the topic. Gerard Toal's Near Abroad: Putin, the West, and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus is an important contribution to this growing body of literature. As the title suggests, the book focuses on the geopolitical tussle between the US and Russia over Georgia and Ukraine. Toal's starting point is that 2008 became a "very significant year in the remaking of post-Soviet space" (92). There are three reasons for this: the official recognition of Kosovo's independence by the US and its allies in February, NATO's Bucharest summit in April, and the Russian five-day war against Georgia in August. These closely intertwined events led to a major rupture in East-West relations. The root causes of this rupture, however, run deeper. As Toal shows, Russia has had a longstanding ambition to maintain a sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space. The US, for its part, seeks to promote liberal norms and institutions across the globe, including the former Soviet region. Accordingly, successive US administrations have worked hard for the eastward expansion of NATO. Many former Soviet republics, in turn, seek protection from Russia by teaming up with the US-led NATO alliance, whereas several minority groups within the post-Soviet space look to Moscow for protection. In other words, there are numerous fault lines of conflict in the former Soviet region that-like a Matryoshka doll-are nested within each other. To shed light on this complex web of relations, Toal draws on concepts and insights from critical geopolitics. Critical geopolitics is an approach to international relations that seeks to expose how political authorities use geopolitical speech acts to justify their decisions. The specific purpose of Toal's study is to identify the competing "geopolitical policy-storylines" (40) of different actors in the run-up to and aftermath of Russia's military interventions in Georgia and Ukraine. The resulting analysis is highly nuanced, but simultaneously accessible to a general readership. Its main conclusion is that "affective geopolitics involving identity, status and memory" (287) has been the driving force behind Russia's interventions. The book's particular merit is that it examines in detail the interplay of the local, regional, and global dynamics that have surrounded Russia's military actions in Georgia and Ukraine.