ELIZABETH CULLEN DUNN
Indiana University
MICHAEL S. BOBICK
University of Pittsburgh
The empire strikes back:
War without war and occupation without occupation
in the Russian sphere of influence
A B S T R A C T
Russia’s recent actions in Ukraine constitute a new
form of warfare distinctly suited for a 21st-century
battlefield. Through a comparative analysis of the
political technologies it has deployed there and in
two other conflict zones, Georgia and Moldova, we
maintain that Russia is implementing a new political
strategy that utilizes fear and intimidation to thwart
a further eastward expansion of the European Union
and NATO. By masking Russian “occupation without
occupation” as humanitarian and as fulfilling a
“responsibility to protect,” Vladimir Putin satirizes
the moral and legal arguments used by Western
states to justify their own international
intervention. Ultimately, we argue that the pervasive
fear created by Eurasia’s frozen conflicts constitutes
a new form of post-Soviet liminality that challenges
the norms of the international system. [Russia,
Ukraine, war, sovereignty, empire, satire, spectacle]
he spectacular and violent protests in Kiev’s “Euromaidan” in
2013 and 2014 brought attention to long-brewing disputes about
Europe’s eastern boundary.1 While burning tires cloaked the atmosphere in oily smoke, snipers took aim at protesters demonstrating in favor of Ukraine’s trade agreement with—and eventual accession to—the European Union. No sooner had the Euromaidan
protesters won and Ukraine’s pro-Russian president been ousted, than
Ukraine was invaded by Russia.2 Under the pretext of protecting Russianspeaking Ukrainian citizens on the Crimean peninsula, the Russian military invaded the breakaway province of Crimea, seized Ukrainian infrastructure and military bases, and sponsored a referendum in which
Crimeans voted to join the Russian Federation. But the Russian Federation’s invasion of Crimea is far more than a small regional conflict: It opens
the question of where Europe ends and where a resurgent Russian empire
will stake out its own sphere of influence. Like nothing since the end of the
Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, Crimea has brought issues of war, occupation,
and separatism back to the forefront of European politics.3
What kind of sovereignty does Russian president Vladimir Putin’s new
strategy create? How does his agenda affect the people who must confront expansive Russian power? The two of us have some sense of this:
Michael Bobick works in Transnistria, a breakaway province of Moldova
often subject to Russian political manipulation, while Elizabeth Cullen
Dunn works in the Republic of Georgia, with people who were ethnically
cleansed from South Ossetia, a breakaway province invaded by Russia in
2008 (see Bobick 2011, 2012; Dunn 2012a, 2012b, in press). In this essay, we
use our ethnographic experience in these comparative cases rather than
research in Ukraine itself to explore the techniques Putin is using throughout the region to establish Russia’s resurgent empire. We make three arguments: first, that Putin’s “occupation without occupation” is a distinctive form of warfare that uses the cultural construction of fear and intimidation to beat back the borders of the European Union; second, that
T
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 405–413, ISSN 0094-0496, online
C 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1548-1425. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12086
American Ethnologist
Volume 41 Number 3 August 2014
by justifying “occupation without occupation” on the
grounds of humanitarianism and the “responsibility to protect,” Putin satirizes the ideology that the United States
and western Europe have used to justify invading sovereign
states, eviscerating it as a moral standpoint; and, third,
that Putin uses the pervasive fear created by these frozen
conflicts to constitute a new form of post-Soviet liminality
that challenges international law, humanitarian intervention, and the rules of the international system.
In making these arguments, we begin to explore Putinism as a form of what Clifford Geertz (1981) called the
“theater state”—that is, a state that focuses on the production of spectacle rather than on economic development or
the provision of social welfare. Putin’s form of warfare is
as much about information and image as it is about military capacity. It is the spectacle of dominance, much more
so than actual military occupation, that creates docile populations within the new geographic boundaries of empire
in Europe. As Putin extends this new form of sovereignty
into Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, he challenges the bureaucratic rationality that is the foundation of contemporary EU governance with a new mode of governance that
relies on threat, innuendo, and calibrated displays of the capacity for arbitrary and spectacular violence. Ukraine illustrates the extent to which the European Union and the Russian sphere of influence are becoming commensurable political projects, each with a distinctive mode of sovereignty
(Espeland and Stevens 1998). Each has its own bureaucratic norms, standards, practices of violence, and forms of
sovereignty. Yet they are more than merely commensurable:
As during the Cold War, each of these modes of sovereignty
undermines the foundational terms of the other while seeking to expand its own spatial domain. This makes them
competing modes of power that inevitably struggle over
territory.
It is too soon (as we write this in April 2014) to say
very much about what kind of power Putin is constituting and what its stakes are for an anthropology of the
state and sovereignty. The effects of this strategy are still
murky. It might fail, or it might have long-lasting effects.
Other actors on the ground, including pro-Russian separatists and pro-EU Maidan activists, are acting in ways that
Putin cannot control. Whatever the outcome, the dynamics show the birth of a new form of sovereignty that does
not work on the European Union’s principles of biopolitics but, instead, relies on new technologies of rule specifically adapted to post-Soviet political circumstances. These
new political technologies have their origins not in Western
institutions of neoliberal governmentality but in Soviet-era
practices and identifications (Humphrey 2002; Kharkhordin
1999; Yurchak 2005). These practices are being adapted to
the 21st-century context, in which spectacle and image, not
the body, become the terms on which political power is
established (Agamben 1998; Debord1990, 1994; Kantorow-
406
icz 1957; Macdonald 2007; Petryna 2002; Rigi 2007; Verdery
1999; Virilio 2006).
Leveraging frozen conflicts
The Ukrainian Euromaidan protests stemmed from the European Union’s ambiguous “Eastern Partnership” policy,
which encompassed Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Belarus,
Armenia, and Azerbaijan, six post-Soviet states that border
the Russian Federation and contain ethnically Russian or
Russian-speaking populations. In 2008, Georgia, Moldova,
and Ukraine were all making moves toward joining the European Union. But, fatigued by its rapid eastern expansion in 2004 and wary of antagonizing Russia, the European
Union refused to offer them a Membership Action Plan,
which would have given them an on-ramp to joining. Instead, the Eastern Partnership countries were only offered
Association Agreements, which established visa-free travel
and tariff-free imports but did not create definitive steps toward membership (Asmus 2010).
To Russia, these agreements spelled danger: They
brought the EU (and its de facto military arm, NATO) up
to Russian borders. To counter this threat, Russia enacted
the same strategy in Georgia and Moldova that it later did in
the Ukraine. Under the pretext of keeping the peace or protecting the rights of Russian-language speakers or Russian
passport holders, the Russian government has supported
separatism—both politically and with direct material aid
to armed militias—in the Moldovan breakaway province of
Transnistria, the Georgian separatist regions of Abkhazia
and South Ossetia, and the Ukrainian province of Crimea.
The key element of Putin’s strategy is to use these
breakaway regions as perches from which to threaten the
larger states that once governed them. Whether the Russians ostensibly recognize the separatist regions as independent states (as in South Ossetia or Abkhazia), support them (as in Transnistria), or annex them directly (as
in Crimea), Russian military forces operate in these regions and guarantee their security. In Georgia, Russian
forces have brought in tanks, aircraft, and troops to occupy them militarily, while in Transnistria, 1,500 Russian
soldiers maintain the peace in a conflict in which Russia occupies the roles of aggressor, provocateur, and peacekeeper.
But Putin has held back from occupying territory beyond
these breakaway regions and inside the de jure sovereign
states that they are a part of—namely, Georgia, Ukraine,
and Moldova. Instead, by using information (and disinformation) about the position and action of Russian forces inside the breakaway regions, Putin has sought to control the
internationally recognized sovereign states through threats
and intimidation. This template for reestablishing control
over Russia’s “near abroad”—not a full-on military invasion
but only a creeping occupation and subsequent takeover of
strategic positions in the breakaway regions—constitutes a
The empire strikes back
new form of warfare. As the Russians learned from watching
the U.S. invasion of Iraq, wars are cheap but occupations
are costly. But by occupying these breakaway provinces and
establishing military bases from which to threaten occupation of Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, Russia creates a climate of mistrust and fear that controls the actions of the
sovereign states and their polities. (Not coincidentally, this
climate also serves to discipline the pro-European intellectuals who oppose Putin within Russia, as they are quickly
labeled a traitorous “Fifth Column” of spies and sympathizers to be rooted out and imprisoned).4
Putin’s interventions on behalf of “compatriots,”
sootechestvenniki—individuals who often are Russian citizens, speak Russian, and consider themselves to be culturally Russian yet who live within the boundaries of other
states—have become a hallmark of his tenure. In his 2005
Address to the Federal Assembly he called on Russians to recall “Russia’s most recent history”: “Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major
geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our cocitizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian
territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected
Russia itself” (Putin 2005).
Though much attention has focused on the first part
of this quote, his comments on Russia’s “near abroad”
are perhaps more relevant. Russians living outside Russia
constitute a category of people that, under Russian law,
can and should be protected by the Russian state (Zvelov
2008). The law “On State Policy of the Russian Federation
with respect to Compatriots Abroad” defines compatriots
as “people living in other states deriving from some ethnicity that has historically resided in Russia” along with
people who have “made a free choice to be spiritually,
culturally and legally linked to the Russian Federation”
(Russian Federation 1999). This choice can include “an act
of self-identification, reinforced by social or professional
activity for the preservation of Russian language, the native
languages of the peoples of the Russian Federation, or the
development of Russian culture abroad.” There is a fundamental indeterminacy in this definition, but, much like the
indeterminacy of the “responsibility to protect” invoked by
the West (which we discuss below), it gives Putin the flexibility to choose to intervene only when it is in the service of
other political objectives. No matter what language it uses
as justification, Russia intervenes on behalf of its “compatriots” in breakaway provinces if and only if doing so serves
its goal of reestablishing the sphere of influence it lost in the
1990s.
Most Russian citizens welcome these tangible steps to
restore Russia’s influence in its “near abroad.” Indeed, after his Crimean intervention, Putin’s approval rating rose
almost 20 percent to a three-year high of 80 percent
(Taylor 2014).5 By reinvoking the rights of secession and
American Ethnologist
ethnic self-determination, and the right that ostensibly
accrued to Soviet republics under Soviet law, Putin implicitly claims to be reinstating the durable institutional frame
for national cadres, intelligentsias, languages, and cultures
that collapsed along with the Soviet state, while, at the same
time, restoring Russian primacy in the region. In doing so,
he articulates a national vision to an otherwise disoriented
post-Soviet population, one that for many reasons is often nostalgic for the Soviet past (Klumbytė 2010; Oushakine
2009; Ries 2009; Szmagalska-Follis 2008).
Within the breakaway provinces, both separatists and
their Russian allies have worked hard to create a daily sense
of being under siege from the de jure states and to create
an image of the militarized Russian state as a necessary
protector of minority rights. Transnistria, the separatist region of Moldova, was the earliest experiment in this technique, which was later deployed during Russian occupations in Georgia and Ukraine (Bobick 2012). In Transnistria, a brief conflict with Moldova in 1992 resulted in a
tenuous peace agreement signed under duress and guaranteed by the Russian military. Twenty-two years later,
Russian-speaking Transnistrians of all nationalities, including Moldovans, Russians, and Ukrainians, have internalized the idea of threat from a common enemy represented
by the Moldovan state. The Transnistrian state is symbolically formed by constantly reiterating the damages and
the casualties inflicted by the Moldovan state on Transnistrians during the 1992 war (Bobick 2011:244). Memorialized both individually and collectively in public monuments and invoked rhetorically by elites, those who died
at the hands of Moldovan “fascists” make the largely unrecognized and only weakly institutionalized Transnistrian
state seem real, vital, and necessary. Just as in Ukraine,
where Russian speakers present the Ukrainian national government as threatening both their language and their way
of life, the Transnistrian state presents itself as protecting Russian-speaking residents from Moldovan attempts
to disenfranchise them both ethnically and linguistically
by establishing Romanian as the sole national language.
Transnistria’s declaration of separatism in 1990 and the ongoing campaign to join the Russian Federation are thus explicitly aimed not only at language rights but also at the
much larger project of guaranteeing the right of Russian
speakers to live politically, socially, culturally, and emotionally as Russians. At the same time, of course, the declaration of separatism also creates less-discussed opportunities
to control local politics, to control oil and gas transit routes,
and to facilitate a range of “gray market” economic activities, from graft to human trafficking to smuggling.
The sense of intimidation and threat is most forcibly
deployed at the fortifications and borders around this small
separatist region, which serve no other practical purpose
than to affirm the de facto polity and limit the reach
of the Moldovan state. While machine gun nests on the
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Volume 41 Number 3 August 2014
Moldovan side of the border face Transnistria, Russian soldiers with Kalashnikovs stationed at strategic bridges and
transportation corridors within Transnistria eye passing vehicles from positions in which tanks, armored personnel
carriers, and machine guns lie under camouflage netting.
Everyday life throughout Transnistria reflects this militarization, as checkpoints and document checks reinforce the
idea of the Transnistrian state as vigilant protector and portray Russia, which secures a Soviet-era arms depot with
over 22,000 tons of war materiel, as the protector of the
protectors.
As in Ukraine, where military forces without insignia
played a murky role in seizing Crimea (Yurchak 2104), the
actual role of Russians in Transnistria is unclear. Although
they are the primary enablers and supporters of Transnistria as a polity, there is no formal “chain of command”
structure that links the Transnistrian leadership to Moscow
patrons. Rather, Transnistrian elites act within a set of unarticulated, informal boundaries of political action shaped by
the pervasive sense of threat. They believe their interests coincide with Russia’s, and they eagerly anticipate and accommodate Moscow’s strategic and ideological goals. Transnistria is thus governed informally by Russia, more through the
use of symbols and implied threats than through direct governance, but nonetheless efficiently.
With Transnistria under Russian control, Moldova,
the de jure state, can also be informally controlled. Even
Moldovan attempts to assert sovereignty in its undisputed
territory are profoundly limited. For example, Russian
deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin, Putin’s special envoy to Transnistria, met Moldova’s 2013 negotiations with
the European Union on an Association Agreement with a
threat to suspend natural gas deliveries passing through
Transnistrian territory. “We hope you will not freeze this
winter,” he said ominously (Kashi 2014). More recently, Rogozin has said that any actions taken by Moldova or Ukraine
to hinder the free passage of Transnistrians would be a “direct threat to the security and constitutional freedom of
200,000 citizens of Russia permanently living in Transnistria . . . it [Russia] is the guarantor of constitutional rights
of its citizens” (Kashi 2014). Thus, by threatening economic
sanctions and military intervention, Russia can essentially
veto any major political decision by Moldova, severely constrain its export-dependent economy, and deport or otherwise deny entry to the more than 200,000 Moldovans who
work as migrant laborers in Russia.
In Georgia, the same kind of political blackmail has
been deployed from two breakaway provinces, one on each
side of the country. Russian forces occupy Abkhazia in the
northwest, on the Black Sea coast, and South Ossetia in the
north-central part of the country, just south of the Russian
border. In South Ossetia in 2007, Putin declared his concern
for the rights of ethnic Ossetians, many of whom were bilingual in Russian, who believed themselves to be threatened
408
by the newly Western-oriented Georgian government. In response to this sense of threat—much of which stemmed
from Georgian president Saakashvili’s takeover of Adjara,
another semiautonomous region—Putin offered ethnic Ossetians Russian passports, which effectively made them
Russian citizens. In 2008, the Georgian Army invaded South
Ossetia to forestall Russian forces from entering. Using
the same language that justified NATO’s intervention in
Kosovo and the U.S. bombing of Libya, Russian forces began shelling Georgia and flowed into both South Ossetia
and Abkhazia to oust the Georgians and occupy the now ostensibly “independent” provinces. In South Ossetia, a mere
35 miles from the capital of Georgia, Russian and Ossetian
forces ethnically cleansed almost all the Georgian residents
by first aerially bombing their villages and, then, looting and
burning their houses. “The Russians destroyed simply everything,” said an elderly Georgian woman (interviewed by
Elizabeth Dunn) who had fled the violence in South Ossetia
on foot. In the Georgian village of Qurti, Russian forces even
bulldozed Georgians’ homes and in their places built new
military bases for the Russian 58th Army, which brought in
fighter planes, armored tanks, and military personnel (International Crisis Group 2009). Along the border with Georgia proper, which is officially known as the administrative
boundary line (ABL), the Russian Army has put up barbed
wire, military installations, snipers’ nests, roads that allow
armored vehicles to move at more than 60 mph, and paths
for patrols with dogs that root out any of the former residents who might try to steal back in to see relatives and
friends (Aptsiauri and Bigg 2013).
The result has been a constant state of tension and
fear. In the first year after the war, Russian tanks racing
down the newly cut road on the other side of the boundary
line were visible from Georgia’s main east–west highway. By
2011, Russian forces had begun building military installations right on the boundary line, with communication towers and barracks easily visible to nearby residents. With an
unmarked border, villagers entering their own gardens or
following livestock feared being picked up by Russian military forces and imprisoned or beaten before being expelled
back across the ABL. Finally, in 2013, the Russians rolled out
an enormous barbed wire fence along the ABL, which Georgians believe is being slowly moved forward to capture additional territory. The Russian presence is constantly felt in
the camps housing internally displaced persons along the
ABL, in the villages, and even in Tbilisi, where residents live
with constant uncertainty and fear (Dunn 2012a, in press;
Dunn and Cons 2013). “Who knows when they will come?” a
woman in the village of Koshki, which abuts the ABL, asked
Elizabeth Dunn. “Their soldiers come into the village all the
time, asking us for vodka and wine and food. Who knows
when the entire army will come? I’m afraid.”
The Georgian polity too is afraid. Between 2008 and
2012, the government of Mikheil Saakashvili faced Putin
The empire strikes back
down. While Putin famously declared, “I’ll hang him
[Saakashvili] by his balls,” Saakashvili retorted, “He [Putin]
doesn’t have enough rope,” and continued to approach the
United States, the European Union, and NATO (see Mayr
2012). But by 2012, Georgian voters realized how risky this
form of posturing had become and elected Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream party, which actively sought rapprochement with the Russian government. In the ensuing
two years, Russia has been able to fundamentally influence Georgian policy: Russia’s Foreign Ministry has warned
of “serious consequences” if Tbilisi continues what it describes as “political speculation” at any time (see Aptsiauri
and Bigg 2013). Although the European Union has offered
both Georgia and Moldova Association Agreements in the
wake of the invasion of Crimea, it is still unclear whether it
will allow them to become member states and whether Russia, with its military perched on the borders, would allow it.
War without war, occupation without occupation
The de facto occupations of both Transnistria and South
Ossetia make up a theatrical and performative form of
sovereignty. Like the Balinese “theater state” described by
Clifford Geertz (1981), Putin’s regime is focused on the
provision of dramatic spectacle. Unlike Geertz’s Negara,
though, the expansive Putinist state does not provide theater and ritual in lieu of warfare: here, theater is warfare,
and warfare is theater (Rigi 2007). Putin’s Russia enacts invasion, violence, and the functions of statehood through
small-scale gesture rather than through full-blown military
action or governance. This is a form of political synecdoche,
where a war inside a breakaway province stands for a potential war inside the de jure state and where the occupation of the separatist region creates the constant threat that
the country as a whole will be occupied. This war without
war and occupation without occupation is nearly as effective, more flexible (since the target of the potential invasion
can be rapidly changed), and decidedly cheaper than a real
occupation. For those in the breakaway regions, occupation
without formally occupying and annexation through carefully orchestrated, mass participatory endeavors like referenda open new domains where values, fears, and norms are
reconstituted into a daily experience of threat and there is
only one entity capable of restoring “order”: the Russian
Federation, the legal successor to the Soviet Union. Staging a performance in which signifiers of military force let
onlookers in both the breakaway region and the de jure
state imagine life under occupation by an opposing force
(Yurchak 2014), then, gives Russia a current and future
means of influencing the internal affairs of the sovereign
state in which these entities exist. Putin is gambling on
the likelihood that, while Russia occupies the separatist regions, the de jure states will occupy themselves, creating
docile client states for Russia even as they ostensibly oppose
American Ethnologist
Russian dominance. The alternative, of course, is something Putin is also prepared for: a full-on violent military
conflict. The prospect of armed conflict, though, has had
the effect of making not only Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia docile but the financially struggling European Union
and war-weary United States as well.
Despite the military occupation, though, Putin’s performance is not all drama. Much of the narrative in which
the occupation of the breakaway provinces is embedded is,
in fact, stiob, or satire of a particularly Russian kind that
“imitated and inhabited the formal features of authoritative
discourse to such an extent that it was often difficult to tell
whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or
a peculiar mixture of the two” (Boyer and Yurchak 2010:213;
see also Haugerud 2013). In his purported defense of “compatriots,” Putin both uses and satirizes the “Responsibility
to Protect” (R2P), a political doctrine driven by the United
States (particularly UN ambassador and Obama advisor
Samantha Power) and enshrined by the United Nations. The
Responsibility to Protect authorizes “the international community” or third-party states to intervene in the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation if the sovereign state cannot protect its own population from gross human rights violations such as ethnic cleansing and genocide (Chesterman 2011:279; International Commission on Intervention
and State Security 2001:xxii). It was originally meant to authorize foreign intervention in situations like the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and international interventions to
protect separatist minority populations seeking ethnic selfdetermination, such as in Kosovo in 1998–99. But its meaning has shifted: The United States, in particular, only declares its use of the Responsibility to Protect in its own
immediate geopolitical interests. In declaring that his attempts to reestablish the Soviet empire are merely an exercise of the Responsibility to Protect, and in justifying military intervention in Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova by comparing it to NATO intervention in Kosovo, Putin performs
the same script as Western advocates of R2P but with a
snide wink, overtly claiming to use the same principle of
humanitarian action that the West does while transparently
revealing an equivalence between U.S. and Russian imperial ambitions. By distancing the effects of war—violence,
social disruption, economic destruction—from the term itself, Russia has redefined peace as a continuation of war by
other means. Then, instead of a formal declaration of war,
humanitarian intervention becomes an instrument to intimidate, wage violence, and ultimately control neighboring states. James Rudolph (2014) claims that Putin “distorts”
R2P, but this is exactly the point: to distort the rhetoric of international humanitarian action to reveal the realpolitik at
its core. When Russia knowingly occupies another country’s
sovereign territory, organizes a referendum at the barrel of a
gun, annexes it, and uses human intervention and international law to justify its actions, mockery has come full circle.
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In the absence of offering any counterweight to Russian aggression, the West is left to make its case against Russia using these same terms from an obvious position of sincerity,
even though they have been drained of any moral force.
Putin’s theater thus challenges the idea of a world divided among recognized territories and creates zones from
which the fundamental terms of politics, place, and belonging in Europe are redefined. Given the Russian Federation’s
significant military assets and increasing military budget,
the Kremlin can (and will continue to) deploy its resources
to ensure that the Russian periphery is composed of states
mired in Russian-managed conflicts that offer no easy resolution. These conflict zones, administered by local elites
dependent on the ongoing presence of the Russian military and Russian “humanitarian aid” for their security and
economic survival, are the 21st-century equivalent of vassal states. A new form of liminality opens up, in which there
are regions that are neither independent nation-states nor
fully taken over by other states, neither self-governing nor
occupied, neither at war nor at peace. This is not the old
Cold War, in which global conflict is based on a standoff between superpowers. Rather, it is a miniaturized Cold War,
in which frozen conflicts in small—even tiny—regions become levers with which Russia can undermine Western political ideologies, challenge unipolar superpower rule, and
alter its geopolitical standing with the West. The liminalityat-large caused by these entities, internalized by their inhabitants, is perhaps the ultimate goal of Russian actions: to
wage war by maintaining peace in a conflict in which Russia is simultaneously provocateur, enabler, aggressor, and
peacemaker.
The future of Crimea and Russia’s near abroad
So what does this strategy mean for Crimea, Ukraine proper,
and the other states now threatened by expanding Russian
imperialism? Russian intervention in its “near abroad” has
significantly changed the terms of nation-states on the Russian periphery, as it forces them to reevaluate not only their
treatment of Russian compatriots but also their actions as
independent nation-states. What Crimea has made explicit
is that Russia, like the United States, has once again recaptured the superpower status that allows it to use international law as a means of securing strategic needs.6 Just
as the United States supported Kosovo’s independence and
argued that it constituted a special case that should not
become a precedent in international law, Russia too intervenes under dubious circumstances. This disingenuous intervention is a success only if international organizations
and their monitors are kept at bay: Only in the absence of
any reliable external observation can jingoism be packaged
as humanitarian intervention, occupation as national selfdetermination, and war as peacekeeping (see also de Waal
2010; Fassin and Pandolfi 2010; Pandolfi 2003, 2010).
410
Discussion and debate on the legitimacy or illegitimacy
of Russian actions and Western intervention obscure a
particularly salient point: that the de facto polities of the
Russian “near abroad” are artifacts of war, with all the confusion and tension that implies. Like any other geopolitical
form, these separatist regions have a unique set of norms,
processes, and economies. They remain economically and
symbolically parasitic on their recognized counterparts but
provide rents and perquisites to both elites and ordinary
residents. For residents in the separatist regions, becoming
part of a quasi-state that offers at least the appearance of
belonging to the “national order of things” (Maalki 1995)
provides a sense of order in uncertain times. Yet, at the same
time, their simultaneous reliance on their de jure counterparts and Russian imperial force creates a prolonged
sense of liminality that provokes anxiety and fear on a national scale. If the experiences of Transnistria, Abkhazia,
and South Ossetia offer anything to go on, the residents of
Crimea who supported the split with Ukraine may soon find
themselves in a state of political and economic ambiguity
that substantially dims their enthusiasm for an alliance with
Russia (see Vartanyan and Barry 2014).
The de jure states caught between the European
Union–NATO and Russia face the same problem of longterm liminality and geopolitical ambiguity. Countries like
Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia are consigned to a international “no man’s land” in which their de jure sovereignty is
recognized and affirmed by EU and U.S. officials who, while
offering much needed symbolic support, have failed to offer
any significant counter to Russia aggression.7 As long as the
European Union and NATO will not admit Ukraine, Georgia,
and Moldova, and as long as Russia threatens them, they
will remain states caught in limbo, unable or unwilling to
join alliances that would guarantee their security yet unwilling to confront Russia, which lavishes development aid
and discounted natural gas on them according to the degree of their cooperation. The fear of having a frozen conflict in Ukraine like those in Moldova and Georgia may well
force the post-Maidan Ukrainian government to capitulate
to Russian demands, and in doing so, will damage its autonomy as much as if Russia had in fact invaded. With a performance that simultaneously instills a pervasive atmosphere
of danger and offers protection from it, Putin seeks to render eastern Europeans, their governments, European institutions, and the United States fearful and powerless.
Putin’s strategy in Ukraine is thus a territorial expansion of what Jakob Rigi (2007) has called “the chaotic
mode of domination,” an emergent form of sovereignty
that blends spectacular displays of state power with coercive force in new and frightening ways. In a situation in
which the state has lost the unquestioned hegemony created through ideological persuasion (Gramsci 1971), power
comes from the blurring of the boundaries between the legal and the illegal and between the legitimate use of force
The empire strikes back
and random violence (Rigi 2007:41). Because this chaotic
mode of domination obfuscates any distinction between
thug and statesman, it is constituted semiotically by reference to its capacity for catastrophic destruction and, alternately, the subsequent imposition of order. Disorder can
thus be exploited or, in the case of Ukraine, artificially created to serve as a pretext for imposing Putin’s new form
of sovereignty and, in the process, remaking Ukrainian citizens as subjects of Russia’s resurgent empire. In a wry
and satirical way, small but spectacular displays of military power unhinge the citizen and state nexus and replace
it with images of arbitrary violence that become the basis
for new subjectivities and subject positions. Pro-European
Ukrainians become fascists, while democratic, pro-Russian
protesters become separatists at best, terrorists at worst.
In these carefully calibrated, media-driven representations,
Ukraine becomes a failed state on the verge of civil war between any number of oppositions to be substituted at will
(fascists and terrorists, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, EuroAtlantic values and Russian Orthodox values, etc.).
The new form of exceptional sovereignty (Schmitt
2005) deployed by Putin opposes the European Union’s
Weberian bureaucratic rationality with a predatory state
form that operates more like a mafia or a gang (Volkov
2002) than a Foucauldian panopticon. Clarity, openness,
and clearly articulated norms and practices are replaced
by an ideological project marked precisely by a lack of
transparency and an ongoing redefinition of reality for its
(captive) constituents. The Russian annexation of Crimea
and its attempt to foment unrest in mainland Ukraine illustrate the extent to which these informational, ideological battles seek, above all, to redefine geographic, spatial,
and political boundaries. Its new political technologies—
war without war, occupation without occupation—thus
become the potential basis for a new mode of government that challenges not only the territorial expansion of liberal democracy but also its very conceptual
foundations.
Notes
Acknowledgments. The authors would like to thank several
individuals for their help and encouragement in bringing this essay
to press. We would like to thank Catherine Wanner for her insightful comments on an early draft, and in particular we would both
like to thank Angelique Haugerud for her editorial support and intellectual engagement with this work. The generous comments of
the anonymous AE reviewer were essential in clarifying our argument. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn dedicates this essay to the memory
of Tamuna Robakidze.
1. On the Euromaidan protests, see Hauser 2013 and Snyder
2014. On the larger issue of the European Union’s eastern boundary, see, for example, Wanner 1998 and Asmus 2010.
2. On Russian involvement in the Crimean referendum and its
military involvement in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, see Myers and
Barry 2014, Walker et al. 2014, and Weiss 2014.
American Ethnologist
3. On the Yugoslav Wars and the problem of ethnic separatism in
Europe, see Denich 1994 and Hayden 1996. For a moving fictional
rendition of the key issues surrounding Yugoslav ethnic separatism,
see Prcic 2011.
4. We owe this idea to Catherine Wanner.
5. Putin’s highest approval rating of 88 percent occurred in
September 2008 after the Russian–Georgian war.
6. We owe this parallel to Catherine Wanner.
7. Not to mention the fact that simply by creating a “frozen” territorial dispute, Russia ensures that Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova
will never join NATO, since NATO would not admit them knowing
it was likely to be drawn into a war with Russia.
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Elizabeth Cullen Dunn
Department of Anthropology
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405
[email protected]
Michael S. Bobick
Center for Russian and East European Studies
University of Pittsburgh
4400 Wesley W. Posvar Hall
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
[email protected]
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