Frontiers are locations of geopolitical assertion, reification, definition, and experiment, whether physical or symbolic, spatial or temporal. The papers for this special Slavic Review Forum examine important linked and parallel frontier-forming practices. These practices span the postsocialist space yet also, as several authors argue, negate that chronotopic and sociopolitical identifier. Frontier-reformulation practices include ideological constructions of emergent, yet familiar, enemies, new and refurbished commemorative rites and installations, mediated threat prediction, and discourses about undeclared wars that seem to promise to eventuate into future declared or at least named wars. As Neringa Klumbytė tells us in her introduction to this Forum, these practices both point to and produce “eventfulness.”
Events in this constellation accrue in materially-apparent modes such as military exercises, ongoing military engagements, parading soldiers, the surveillance of minority-group citizens, and the arrests of spies, yet they inscribe many frontiers of potential conflict via more seemingly symbolic means: performance, mediated spectacle and debate, ritualization processes, political adornments, talk, rumors, and other everyday discursive pronouncements and play. Taken together as assemblages within and across societies, these events act like massive societal magnetizers, aligning and patterning subjectivities, fears, desires, griefs, and aggressions. They simultaneously fuse, confuse, and divide polities, while also charging them with affect of every kind, at all levels of scale from the familial and local to the national and transnational. They work as effectively in skies cut by NATO jet formations as in sleep broken by dreams of forced evacuation.
A phrase from Dr. Klumbytė’s paper captures what is at stake across these cases. She refers to the growing political imaginary in Lithuania, which entails public expectation of war with Russia as “the new eventual war frontier.” Predictions of “eventual war” comprise a discursive frontier in the sense that frontiers delineate social fault lines, “sides” in a conflict, and battlefronts in actual potential wars that threaten to be both transnational and civil.
Looking at the commemorative entrenchment of Maidan memory in Ukraine, Catherine Wanner sees new “alloys of grief and aggression” becoming fixed into long-lasting and officially-fueled potency. Recognizing the dead of Maidan but also those killed in the “undeclared war” in eastern Ukraine, ritual mourning and commemoration in Kyiv lays down walkable tracks of politicized emotional memory which, as Wanner shows, creates in many a spontaneous urban affect and unscripted national allegiance. The complex, not uncontested revision and reinscription of Soviet and post-Soviet history through both vernacular and state-sculpted commemoration promises, as Klumbytė’s paper also argues, the sense that a new era has begun. Will it ultimately be named by massive military events, as so many eras are? This seems to be the question hovering over this and the other essays in the Forum.
Vasiliki Neofotistos chronicles the easy acceptance of a campaign to brand liberal NGOs as anti-sovereign enemies of Macedonia; though carried out by ousted nationalist Prime Minister Nicola Gruevski, convicted of bribery in May 2018, the campaign nevertheless seems to have hardened political frontiers into an imagined civil war, where militant populist patriotic associations successfully cast Soros-funded NGOs as anti-Macedonian armies. In Latvia, Liene Ozoliņa finds, those who welcome refugees are branded “velkomisti” and “liberasti”—European-minded internationalists threatening the very state. Latvians who live abroad and refuse mandatory military refreshers, as well as those who claim they would leave rather than participate in a war with Russia, help to justify consolidation of a “law-and-order state” that can deploy its citizens as it sees fit in that “eventual war.”
Ozoliņa provides the term “analytical borderland” to define this frontier. The analysis is, importantly, an everyday one, a vernacular one. In Latvia, she finds that people question whether the state can hold, whether the citizen-state relationship can hold, in a sense asking whether the state as an ideal holds up for Latvians as part of their selfhood. People wonder (often aloud) if they would answer the state's interpellative call, but also, in a sense stuck in a Prisoner's Dilemma, whether the state that hails them would ultimately also fail them. Parallel to this, as Neofotistos argues, Macedonia's “civil society war” entails performance in body, costume, ritual, peer surveillance, and suspicion discourses as ways to affirm and prove affiliation to the state (or to the idea of the state) instead of to powerful transnational ideals and organizations. Neofotistos poses the critical question as to what the impacts are when bellicose performance and attack increasingly characterize civil society alliances and activities. Domestic political spaces, such as NGOs, become the frontier of battle, and, as in the Maidan-commemorating practices Wanner describes in Kyiv, politically charged and even divisive identity symbolism cemented to the cityscape of the capital. Crucial is the ability to explore these unfolding practices ethnographically, observing charged political sentiments as they freeze into the cement of statist romance—practices which, as we too well understand, also reify frontiers of the “new eventual war.”
Some vital frontiers, as all of these papers remind us, are laid down mainly via discursive technologies, in high-stakes but also hard-to-read communicative practices. As politics and entertainment are more completely intermingled, the slipperiness of discourse helps to makes frontiers unfixed and unfixable. Do political threats or uncertainties conveyed through popular culture, performance, or commemoration jiggle the frontiers of war just enough to make citizenries wary of reading event into “eventfulness”?
Do rumor-talk, urban ritual practices, or playing at war—whether in Baltic flyover formations, Macedonian parliament scuffles, or in mediated teases about apocalyptic intent—disguise or diffuse geostrategic commitments? The essays in this forum collectively wonder whether “new eventual war frontiers” reify something already past or passing—something like postsocialism on the way out—or whether they are expressions of ongoing but heightened geopolitical anxiety and a sense of events on the horizon. Yet each essay also poses the possibility that practices of affective engagement—worry, militarized nightmares, mourning, suspiciousness, rage—engrave their own eventfulness into the geopolitical terrain and moment. Every paper in this forum details multiple modes of affective stimulation and emotional engagement, operating on multiple levels of scale and impact, in both clarity and confusion. Everywhere across this landscape, publics seem to express momentous awareness of the hardening frontiers that such affect both portends and produces.
