Critical Biopolitics of the Post-Soviet by Andrey Makarychev & Alexandra Yatsyk

Author:Andrey Makarychev & Alexandra Yatsyk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books

Chapter 4

Biopower in Times of Post-Politics

Juxtaposing Ukraine and Georgia

Ukraine and Georgia have gone through major societal transformations in the last decades. On the one hand, they lost some territories to Russia, which made their relations with Moscow conflictual and even inimical. On the other hand, their relationship with the EU bestowed both Kyiv and Tbilisi with new options and openings, including sharing norms and practices within their Association Agreements and Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreements. Both countries are searching for the best balance between the reintegration of lost territories and peaceful relations with Russia in addition to striking a balance between strengthening their national identities and closely associating with the EU supranational project.

The loss of territories to Russia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and Crimea in Ukraine), along with “special” policies of some neighboring countries establishing exceptional relations with ethnic minorities (Poland and Hungary toward the ethnically akin groups in Ukraine and Turkey with regards to Muslims in Adjara) sharpen the debates on national identities in the two countries. In academic terms, these debates might be characterized through such concepts as “domestic others,” inclusion and exclusion, bordering and de-bordering, all of which are conducive to the idea of hybridity as a core component of identity-making practices. In particular, the boundaries of the Ukrainian and Georgian political communities were deployed at the very center of nation-building debate, which raised a number of issues: how to treat people residing in the territories that seceded and were de-facto occupied by Russia? And how to avoid the further disintegration of Georgian and Ukrainian political communities, given the existence of ethnic minorities that might gravitate, in one way or another, to one of neighboring countries?

These controversies betray the inherently dislocated nature of Ukraine’s and Georgia’s liminal/multiple/in-between/borderland (Reid 2003) identities. Hybridity is a well-established concept in the academic literature on post-Soviet transition (Clements et al. 2007; Pieterse 2001; Werbner, Modood, and Bhabha 2015). Our aim in this chapter is to expand this concept to various social and cultural spheres and open it to a variety of interpretations grounded in biopolitical practices. How do practices of biopower adapt to a new hybrid environment and how can this adaptation be discussed in biopolitical terms? How do power holders operating in these countries (governments and Orthodox Churches) and civil society groups adjust to these conditions of hybridity with different identities––often conflicting with each other––at stake?

More specifically, we focus on two major aspects of Ukraine’s and Georgia’s biopolitics in this chapter. First, we engage with the debates that might be called “people or territories,” particularly focusing on Ukraine’s and Georgia’s policies and discourses on their breakaway territories––the Donbas region, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. We assume that explicitly geopolitical interpretations of a variety of post-Soviet conflicts in terms of influence-seeking through territorial possession (Malyarenko and Wolf 2018) give only a partial and rather limited explanation of the developments on the ground. From a critical perspective, one may claim that, on the one hand, “geopolitical processes shape the lives of

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