Kolossov, Vladimir and Gerard Toal
2007
An Empire's Fraying Edge? The North Caucasus Instability in Contemporary Russian Geopolitical Culture
Eurasian Geography and Economics
48
2
202-225
A Russian and a U.S.-based political geographer explore how geopolitical cultures and traditions function in imagining and discursively framing events in specific regions within a particular state. More specifically, this paper undertakes a focused examination of competing elite storylines in Russian geopolitical culture about the North Caucasus during an eventful year (October 2005-September 2006) that encompassed the large-scale terrorist attack against the city of Nal'chik, the change of leadership in Dagestan, and the assassination of the prominent terrorist Shamil Basayev by federal forces. The paper first summarizes Kremlin, left/Communist, national-patriotic, and liberal "storylines" on the basis of a content analysis of major periodicals representing each of these viewpoints, followed by a survey of the opinions of ordinary citizens in the North Caucasus (n = 2,000) regarding the validity of these storylines. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H11, I31, O18, P30. 7 tables, 66 references.
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