Rethinking the Scales of Eurasia: Geopolitical Narratives and Borders in Ukraine

Geopolitics relies on discursive constructions of world affairs to forge privileged meanings in the service of particular aims involving spatial relations. This study interrogates how geographical scale is used to spatialize politics and imagine and advantage agendas using scalar narratives of Eurasia regarding Ukraine in 2014-15. The politics of scale situates the borders of Eurasia within Ukraine. Critical scholarship emphasizes how discourses and scales are performatives, establishing an iterative hegemony through repetition. The dissertation uses a comparative, qualitative discourse analysis framework to interrogate how Eurasia functions as a scale linking places, peoples, and things using texts from discursively marginal and mainstream geopolitical discourses. The relationship between the mainstream discourse of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation and the marginal discourses of the self-proclaimed government of the Donetsk People’s Republic, and the Russian nationalism of neo-Eurasianist thinker Aleksandr Dugin are compared using the annexation of Crimea and war in eastern Ukraine (Donbas) as discursive events. Eurasia in scalar narratives shows the hierarchical and relational facets of scale as a concept. The conceptual intertextuality of Eurasia and the Russian World is manifested in the three discourses. Russian official discourse and nationalist discourse frame the annexation of Crimea as less-than-national and more-than-national scales. The conflict in eastern Ukraine is situated in the discourses as less-than-national through the use of Novorossiya. Novorossiya is also scaled up; Eurasia provides a nodal point offering forms of legitimacy for the Donetsk People’s Republic and the nationalist discourse of neo-Eurasianism. The scalar narratives of the nation-state are threatening and the West is a source of disorder. Eurasia acts as a nodal point, connecting and making equivalent scalar processes and the borders of Eurasia in Ukraine.