Elizaveta Gaufman's short but punchy book, Everyday Foreign Policy, represents an important intervention and innovation in the cluster of popular geopolitics, international relations, nationalism studies, and international studies, bringing home the often-rarified debates on the meaning of foreign policy and grounding them in discussion of everyday talk and everyday choices—whether about holiday destinations (Russians going, or not going to Turkey on holiday) or the purchase of cheese and other “sanctioned” products. All too often the turn to the everyday among political studies scholars is openly belittled by colleagues eager to defend the study of state-to-state relations as restricted to the words of big men. An example of how contested and policed the terrain of international studies is, was illustrated by the hostile responses received by a similar attempt to incorporate consumption—political beer brewing in northern Europe—into critical geopolitics.Footnote 1 Are area and political studies scholars ready for Gaufman's book? I hope so. It is one of the most sophisticated and comprehensive attempts so far to contextualize international relations within daily practices and discourses in both the digital and off-line spheres. This is a hugely ambitious undertaking of theoretical and methodological complexity. As the author notes, there is very little intersection of nationalism and International Relations (IR) literatures and this book is a step to rectify this situation to an extent.
Gaufman begins from a number of premises: that the Russophone internet comprises a vibrant virtual discussion space of extremely politicized groups and individuals. But that the “geopoliticization of any domestic political action” works also in reverse (3). While elections are falsified partly for the purposes of showing to the world the capacity of the state to mobilize internal resources, geopolitical orientations are domesticated in unpredictable ways, such as Russian women becoming the biopolitical objects of approbation for marrying Georgian men. From the outset, Gaufman provides a timely methodological reminder that the study of everyday geopolitics cannot be confined to the often sterile, if not misleading study of social media posts, or tweet counts. It has to be a mixed-methods, or even interdisciplinary undertaking if it is to have interpretive staying power. And this, in a thematic yet complex book, is Gaufman's challenge to her colleagues.
Are marketing and consumer decisions that reflect and even reshape geopolitics legitimate objects of IR? Gaufman answers with a resolute “yes.” Gaufman seeks to build on emergent studies on everyday nationalism in Russia, the post-socialist everyday to push forward a research agenda that can create dialogue between everyday nationalism studies and IR, which she argues remains lacking. While much Russia-focused scholarship examines everyday forms of opposition, Gaufman argues that less attention has been paid to how ordinary people express pro-Kremlin views and how everyday foreign policy comprises an assemblage of larger cognitive schemata dating back to Soviet and pre-Soviet discursive forms.
The structure of the book reflects Gaufman's identification of key foreign policy artefacts realized in the realm of the everyday. These are respectively—the Vladimir Putin cult of personality, the Great Patriotic War and militarization, Sanctions, regional security strategy, great power competitions, and soft power. In turn each chapter makes effective use of a particular emblem—the meaning of Donald Trump in the discussion of great power status, the soccer World Cup in the discussion of soft power. While Ukraine does not feature as a topic in its own right, discussion of Crimean annexation, the intervention in Donbas and the full invasion in 2022 as the book was in production feature prominently enough. Before these empirically-grounded chapters, Gaufman offers a short theoretical overview. Collective identities help shape foreign policies of states. It is a longstanding mistake among some IR scholars to think of nationalism and national identity as exogenous to the international system.Footnote 2
Gaufman's project can be seen as part of the logical extension of banal nationalism studies—just as the nation is reproduced in daily lives, an “everyday foreign policy assemblage” (13) can be investigated by bringing together micro-practices and discourses spanning physical and digital spaces. Furthermore, Gaufman draws attention to the embodiment of political subjectivity and challenges the idea of an elite-mass diffusion of attitudes and dispositions. However, this book is a departure from popular geopolitics as the study of cultural production and producers, instead focusing on consumption and performance, with a notable emphasis on libido and other bodily contained drives, memorably subtitled “eating” and “mating” identity by Gaufman. She makes lively play with gendered and sexualized language and symbols throughout the book, tracing “penetrational heterosexuality” as revealed in questions about “whose button is bigger, whose dog is less fluffy, and who is the boy and who is the girl in interstate relations” (15). A highlight here is the relative neglect of scatological tropes and a marked preference for sexualized domination. Methodologically, Gaufman combined multi-sited ethnography with discourse mapping on social media—particularly a form of process tracing of memes and narratives on the latter. She argues that analyzing mid-sized social media groups provides the best fit for scholars using an “urban digital folklore” approach following in the footsteps of Arkhipova and Radchenko.Footnote 3 For ethical reasons she is less forthcoming about the nature of the interviews which inform her work.
Moving to the thematic chapters, Gaufman notes the well documented tendency to package for consumption the mystical political body of Putin. But how is Putin really assembled on the popular level, she asks? Her answer is that even while waning as a consumable leader, “Putin” transcends the person occupying his physical body and becomes an assemblage well suited to infiltrate the spaces needed to project national identity; he is reduced to a simulacrum of the Russian state and thus is disassembled even while serving as a master referent: in aphorisms and memes characterized by sexualized and gendered themes that ultimately end up in a kitsch and orientalized image inseparable from the man and undermining the political value of a genuine cult of personality.
The militarization of Russian society is most visible in the state's attempts to usurp the memory of WWII and this is well ploughed ground in cultural and sociological studies. Gaufman provides a useful overview of the various forms of militarization of everyday life with a particular focus on visual images in public spaces: from the infamous bumper stickers using rape as a metaphor for victory, to YunArmia (Youth Army) promotional materials. She does not neglect the all-encompassing attempts to provide opportunities to consume the Great Patriotic War to facilitate a dangerous logical fallacy: victory by the Soviets was good because it was a victory against evil, therefore everything that celebrates this victory is positive—even consuming 125 grams of bread so as to “experience” the Leningrad blockage as “playable”—in a term operationalized repeatedly by Gaufman.
In a chapter on the notorious Russian counter sanctions on EU-produced food, Gaufman provides a useful historical contextualization on the various meanings of imported food. This chapter also covers personal sanctions and the use of anti-Obama effigies in public. Throughout the book there is an innovative use of word cloud illustrations based on user comments from various platforms. There are two word clouds in the sanctions chapter based on social media comments from LiveJournal and traced to offline comments from a flashmob featuring phallic images of Russian nuclear rockets. These word clouds are a nice addition, but could have been better curated and explained. The following chapter on “not going to Turkey” is a salutary reminder of the disparity between the racist and gendered condemnation of Turkey after clashes over Syria, and the reality of consumption preferences: 800,000 Russians still went on vacation there annually.
From Hillary Clinton to Barrack Obama to Trump, Russian discourses around the American presidency reveal highly sexist and even misogynistic and racist preferences. Clinton is viewed positively as a wife and very negatively as a politician in her own right. Revealingly, Trumplore in Russia was more about domestic identity building (Trump as what we are not—stupid, inarticulate, and ignorant). While the positive atmosphere created by hosting the World Cup in 2018 represented a rare soft power coup for Russia, Gaufman focuses on how the competition provoked a campaign of biopolitical policing of Russian women. Extreme misogynist and racist Vladislav Pozdnyakov initiated a doxing campaign against Russian women visible on social media in the company of foreign men during the World Cup. A final chapter looks at panic buying and panic talking during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Gaufman in her volume singles out nodes of an assemblage that link foreign policy and everyday practices. These are talking, eating, mating, and buying. In a conclusion she further elucidates her innovative approach: to offer generative links between social processes that may be distant in time and space, such as the way World Cup doxing may relate to Soviet views on race and gender. She defends the interpretive tradition of social and political research from the conservative mainstream of IR, especially when it comes to methods. From the outset, Gaufman stresses her interest is in the patriotic mainstream and citizens’ support for Putin's foreign policy. Understandably this means we only get a glimpse of dissenting voices, although the ironic and playful use of memes and discourses is also evident. It is understandable that as the book moved towards publication the author took action to further protect the identities of her informants and interlocutors and therefore there is understandable ambiguity in the descriptions of where, when, and how fieldwork was carried out. Overall, Gaufman does a great job in showing the very different contexts in which Russian citizens enter into the highly performative process of defending the “honor” of their country and how keenly “ontological security” is made real in the words and practices of ordinary people, somewhat in contrast to what is sometimes proposed as a dominant great power chauvinism. Gaufman also demonstrates how this process reinforces a distinction between “patriots” and “cosmopolitans” in everyday life, how even the most mundane consumption choices can be politicized, and how people willingly enter into the political identification that goes with such consumption. Like the other book in this review, Everyday Foreign Policy lives up to its promise of being accessible beyond its disciplinary positionings, both to area studies and other scholars, but also a general audience. This is thanks to its resolute empirical focus and lively style; while the book does not hide its sophisticated theoretical apparatus, it compactly and concisely presents it from the outset and never labors the point about everyday foreign policy as an assemblage.
Numerous colleagues have privately remarked on the relative paucity of grounded accounts of Ukrainian society and politics published in English beyond the famous examples, mainly written by Anglophone scholars since 2014. Therefore the Ukrainian Voices collection at ididem Verlag curated by Andreas Umland is a vital resource. Umland has published over forty monographs in the series since 2019—a remarkable feat. The volume by Yuriy Lukanov on the Crimean press and its demise fits into the series’ attempt to foreground more reportage-style accounts that deserve rapid promotion and dissemination. Lukanov's book can therefore be compared to other volumes by ibidem such as Anna Romandash's Women of Ukraine (2023), and Kateryna Pylypchuk's The War that Changed Us (2023).Footnote 4
The title The Press: How Russia Destroyed Media Freedom in Crimea speaks perfectly to the contents. But for this reason, a documentary account collected by and from journalists in Crimea is a fundamentally different undertaking from that of Gaufman's project and the two books can hardly be discussed fruitfully together. Certainly Lukanov has provided an insider's document and chronicle, familiar as a genre to historians of dissidence and political upheaval. A large part of the text is presented in italics—direct quotations of journalists in cities like Simferopol΄ who describe the events of the takeover of Crimea by Russian forces and the harassing and then hounding of journalists who are just doing their job. Fairly representative is a section on Valentyna Samar, the leader of the Center for Investigative Reporting in Simferopol on the cumulative pressures up to late summer in 2014: “Many people looked at us like at suicides, some German channels shot a movie about us. We called the occupiers the occupiers. We called the annexation the annexation. We called the illegal government the illegal government. We have been doing our job honestly. As professionally as we did it before. Much of what we were filming and writing then is now evidence to the court, including the International Criminal Court” (77).
Lukanov punctuates such narratives with useful editorial information—such as the date of an arrest or murder of protestors and activists. There are also many useful illustrations of places and events—professional photographs provided by journalists working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), and like in Gaufman's book, illustrations of online and visual content such as the test card of the Crimean Tatar ATR TV channel just before it was forced to stop broadcasting in March 2015. The fate of that channel's journalists represents a recurring theme in the book—despite work in Crimea quickly becoming an impossibility due to the occupation, professionals are able to relocate to Kyiv to continue their important work. This though was a stark choice for journalists; those who staying in Crimea had to curtail their professional activities and distance themselves from their former vocation. Even the archives of media outlets became a source of potential danger and worth evacuating. In January 2015, the FSB interrupted live broadcasting from ATR to search for records of the meetings of Crimean Tatars near the Verkhovna Rada of Crimea from February 2014. To prevent the seamless usurpation of the channel's resources in order to coopt the Tatar cultural agenda in a Russia-friendly reboot of the channel, the archives were “secured” by the staff.
There are many important lessons this book provides. Perhaps the first is how clearly the occupying force understood the need to quickly target and silence independent journalists, and how cynically and ultimately effectively it did this—using both “informal” (thug) methods, and legalistic and administrative ones. The second lesson for those less familiar with the Crimean annexation is that the book provides a vital corrective to misleading interpretations of swift and “polite” take over and broad acquiescence by the population. The opening scene relates a stand off between “self-defense” representatives and journalists outside the Admiralty on March 5, 2014. Pro-Russian activists escalated intimidation of journalists such that it became too dangerous for them to continue their work of documenting the situation of the surrounded Ukrainian naval forces on the peninsula. Other journalists were not so lucky to be merely deported by the “little green men” (Russian special forces without insignia). The early part of the book describes brutal physical assaults on cameramen who “never thought that this would happen in the territory of his native country” (25). Lukanov describes an informal yet sophisticated pattern of harassment and monitoring of journalists via a network of taxi drivers coordinating with Russian military intelligence. The contributors to the book also document the widespread hostility among some ordinary people to the work of the journalists, illustrated by a conversation between a journalist and a volunteer helper near the center of Simferopol, unaware that her interlocutor was a Ukrainian journalist. The women says, “Tell Putin to destroy all this opposition, like Nemstov. Our Yanukovich did not do that, and you see what happened” (32).
Further the volume provides vital evidence to undermine any views as to the legitimacy and transparency of the 16 March referendum, including some ingenious professional methods to fool militias trying to prevent journalists using footage of tellers counting unused ballot papers. Occasionally, as one would expect, the effect of the book is a little fragmented and anecdotal. However, the pace is fast and so much different ground is covered that even without a good general understanding of the events of March 2014 the reader gets a very clear overall impression of how much and how quickly things changed for the free press in the peninsula, if not a clear picture of the broader society and its divisions beyond the professional circles described and doing the describing. This is a book resolutely about journalistic culture and practices, their overcoming of shock and disbelief and attempts to continue their professional activities.
The book is very readable to a lay and scholarly audience alike, but unlike Gaufman's book, this volume is poorly edited and formatted with annoying repetition of text relating to quotations, and some lapses in translation. This could be off putting to a reader less familiar with the context and country. If the book persuades the reader that occupation was orders of magnitude worse than the worst the Yanukovich regime could do to Ukrainians then the author has done his job. While the events in Crimea are nearly ten years distant they are uncanny anticipations of the ensuing erosion of press freedom in Russia: court cases for “calls to violate the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation,” seizures of equipment and long FSB interrogations with no lawyer present, invitations to act as “witnesses” where the person is given to understand that they may quickly become the accused, long term surveillance by security services and worse. Perhaps most sobering and instructive is the aforementioned case of the Crimean Tatar channel ATR. Its staff were under pressure, willing to negotiate to ensure its survival, if only as a cultural channel. However, compromise was futile, a political decision had been made to completely cleanse Crimean media; it was only the police and security services operatives who were given a choice to turn coats. And yet, the volume goes on to describe instances of citizen media up to 2016 and reserves space for a final detailed description of western media outlets peddling pro-Moscow stories about Crimea and how this played into the hands of RT.
