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This is a version of the Eurasian Geography and Economics sponsored keynote paper presented at the Cities After Transition (CAT-network) 10th International Urban Geographies of Post-Communist States Conference, hosted by the Department of Human Geography, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia in September, 2023. Given the numerous overlapping crises that threaten life around the globe at every scale, this paper questions the relevance of status-quo approaches to geographical inquiry, beginning from but not limited to Central and Eastern Europe. In the context of so much urgent and ongoing need, the paper posits that a refinement of conceptual, methodological, and ethical commitments is necessary if we wish to do work that matters. It proposes a series of keystone sensitivities: humility and the appreciation of difference, relevance and the appreciation of the moment, and scale and the appreciation of the everyday. The paper presents the theoretical commitments underpinning each of these keystones and then suggests a menu of practical moves to inform future research and ground academic work within the urgency of the present moment. Ultimately, the paper aspires to break out of the limitations of regional container thinking and instead puts into practice the notion that theory can be generated anywhere, rather than only from select sites in the dominant Anglo-American circuits of knowledge production. On this foundation, the paper attempts to make meaning from difficulty, and offers theoretical and practical suggestions for scholars to do ethical and relevant work in this era of existential crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contributions in this Forum analyse the Russian war against Ukraine from the micro perspective of everyday life, conveyed by scholars who have been impacted at a variety of personal levels. Framed within the existential threat that continues to endanger Ukrainians and Ukraine, the contributions collected here embrace the messiness of lived experience away from the grand narratives that circulate at global scales. Instead, the authors explore a variety of processes of situated bordering that fracture not just territory, but also families and individual lives. In so doing, they shine light on the people and places where geopolitics takes shape on the ground. Taken together, this collection provides a nuanced and human-scale exploration of one of the most momentous geopolitical events in recent history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the growth of the Olympic Games against that of former host cities to understand whether this mega-event may have 'outgrown' its hosts. The increasing hosting requirements and governments' expansive use of mega-events as tools for urban development would suggest that the 'Olympic city' – a term we use for describing the size of the Olympics as hosted in different cities over the decades – has grown at a faster rate than former host cities. The analysis contrasts historical indicators that capture the evolving size of planning for the event based on four dimensions – sport, spectators, marketing and costs – as well as the urban dimension of hosting experiences (venues and infrastructure) with city trajectories based on demographic and economic indicators. This is done through a longitudinal analysis of former Olympic host cities from the 1960s and 1970s and from which continuous longitudinal data are available: Tokyo, Munich, and Montreal. The findings indicate that the Olympic city has grown more strongly than these former host cities, although not uniformly across trajectories. This gives evidence for the need to review the size of mega-event impacts if they ought to continue to generate interest in hosting them in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mega-events like the Olympics and the Football World Cup routinely harm host cities and societies, largely due to their linkages with ambitious urban development agendas. Concurrently, resident protest has had only limited success in mitigating mega-event-related damages, notwithstanding the growth of resistance networks at local, national, and transnational scales. Contextualised within the broader processes of the Agenda 2020 and New Norm Olympic reforms, this paper explores the tactics of protest against the Summer Olympics in Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2028. In so doing, the paper demonstrates how the reforms have moderated some of the more egregious aspects of mega-event harm, while nevertheless preserving some fundamental problems with hosting, albeit in more diffuse or disguised forms. The paper makes sense of these processes through the notion of Potemkinism, conceptualised as a dynamic between the superficial and the substantive, and predicated on obfuscation or concealment. The paper also presents a taxonomy of tactics adopted by host city residents to counter the problems that persist in these processes of Potemkin reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an investigation of authoritarian encounters in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, this paper takes seriously the challenges of making geopolitical sense of contextualised micro moments. Working in a minor key, the paper offers three contributions. First, it advances a minor theory, micropolitical sensibility that interrogates the co-constitution of intimate and geopolitical scales. Second, it proposes a loose ethnographic framework to guide the analysis of ordinary moments, link them outside of the immediate, and make fuller sense of the geopolitical: rupture, digestion, connection, and representation. Third, it aspires to destabilise regional container thinking and Orientalising tendencies through a focus on authoritarian practices rather than authoritarian states. Overall, the paper foregrounds a minoritarian reading of the micro-dynamics of authoritarian encounter in order to enrich the conversation on the constitution of the geopolitical, while also offering an intimate and interconnected methodology that encourages critical, safe, and ethical research under authoritarian conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Global Finance, Local Control: Corruption and Wealth in Contemporary Russia" by Igor O. Logvinenko explores the paradox of how Russia remains financially integrated into the global economic system while functioning as an autocracy with weak rule of law. The book provides an economic history of Russia, focusing on key moments in the transition from state socialism to state capitalism. Logvinenko argues that Russia's political and business elites have strategically used financial openness to legitimize their ill-gotten fortunes and avoid domestic political and legal reforms. While the book offers valuable insights, it suffers from conceptual problems and a lack of precision in its analysis. Nonetheless, it is recommended for those seeking an overview of the Russian political economy or an understanding of kleptocratic authoritarianism in Russia. [Extracted from the article]

Mega-events are global affairs with profound effects across a variety of scales, and are the focus of a large and growing body of academic inquiry. This special section in Sports in Society centers on the urban and economic impacts of mega-events on the societies that host them, offering an examination of individual cases and emerging patterns. The authors explore different dimensions of the recent mega-event experience from around the world, proposing novel ways of theorizing these outsized expressions of transnational sport, politics, commerce, and culture. Combined, these contributions unpack how socio-economic and cultural contexts shape the organization of events and impact hosts in variegated and contingent ways in the Global North, South, and East. This introduction offers a brief overview of the landscape of the existing research before summarizing each contribution and placing them in context within the broader literature. All told, the articles in this special section explore how the Olympics, the FIFA Men's World Cup and the Commonwealth Games deploy different mechanisms to transform urban space, and offer innovative means of understanding what mega-events can do to the people and places that host them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the preparations for the 2018 Men's Football World Cup in Russia through the lens of neoliberal urban entrepreneurialism. Unlike many other mega-events, this World Cup was orchestrated by the central state, though using neoliberal rhetoric to legitimize a wide-ranging urban development program aimed at modernizing peripheral host cities. Grounded in an exploration of urban development in the host city of Volgograd, this paper demonstrates that the intersection of state-led development impulses, neoliberal rhetoric, and local needs resulted in a mega-event that emphasized a narrow form of development over more substantial interventions that could have benefited the host population more efficiently. To make sense of these developments, the paper proposes the concept of Potemkin Neoliberalism, exploring the various dimensions of superficiality inherent in this state-led mega-event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although events such as the Olympic Games and World's Fairs are among the largest of mega-projects, there is little systematic data to evaluate their outcomes over a longer period of time and across multiple sites. This research note describes the first longitudinal database on mega-event outcomes. It lays out the rationale and major goals of the database, its methodological approach and content, and its challenges and limitations. The database allows analysing larger patterns of mega-event contexts and outcomes, and helps evaluating mega-events as public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situated at the intersection of the literatures on soft power and mega-events, this paper explains the production and evolution of the dominant narratives behind the 2018 Men's Football World Cup in Russia. It begins from the premise that there are multiple unexplored dimensions to the concept of soft power and proposes three advancements: the existence of multiple audiences for soft power narratives, the necessity of examining soft power aspirations in the context of hard power constraints, and the investigation of both of these dimensions with a view that acknowledges the role of time. Exploring both externally and internally targeted narratives, this paper demonstrates not only the attempts by Russian authorities to construct hegemonic ideology among the domestic population, but also reveals how the interplay of hard power and soft power concerns changed these narratives over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Europe and the wider world struggles with the COVID-19 crisis, I unpack the impacts of the pandemic on the small, wealthy, and diverse nation of Switzerland. Though deeply intertwined with capital flows and global scales, I eschew a high-level view and instead present an analysis from the ground, informed by minor theory. This micropolitical view enables a nuanced understanding of how the city and the nation are produced in daily life, while the pandemic allows an exploration of what occurs when these processes are interrupted. This investigation reveals unique, situated cartographies of everyday experience that, under pressure of lockdown, reconfigured according to individual, cantonal, and national circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glazunova has published some of this work in a separate article; in book form, she has more space to develop this line of research. Glazunova does not lose sight of this goal, even though the bulk of the book (Chapters 2-7) is dedicated to laying the historical and conceptual groundwork for the case studies at the end. Another strength of the text is in Glazunova's typology of populisms, theorised coherently and then applied to Naval'nyi and associates. [Extracted from the article]

The economic crisis since 2010 has affected Russia’s political economy by reducing the income available to fund political loyalty—the key mechanism of neopatrimonialism. Through an investigation of key infrastructure development projects, we examine how this crisis has affected the preparations for the 2018 Football World Cup. In so doing we introduce the concept of crisis neopatrimonialism, referring to the political and economic adaptations of a neopatrimonial system in response to economic crisis. Our research uncovered three major adaptations of neopatrimonialism in the context of World Cup preparations: a retreat of private money and concomitant rise in public funding, a reordering of favored elites, and higher costs of loyalty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, represented a soft power attempt to introduce a new conception of “Russian-ness” to both domestic and international audiences. Pre- and post-event attitudes regarding Russia were captured at the international, domestic, and local levels from popular opinion surveys, international and domestic mass media and social networks, interviews, and participant observation. The paper concludes that while the international aspirations failed, the domestic population – after some notable problems – accepted this new sense of Russian-ness. Though the Sochi Olympics did not change international perceptions, the games were instrumental in consolidating domestic power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]