| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article is prompted by recent calls for a 'Marxist geopolitics'. By exploring the case of contemporary Belarus, it argues that a Marxist geopolitics already (or rather still) exists in the world beyond the academic ivory tower. A dissection of foreign political discourse surrounding President Alexander Lukashenka over the last decade exposes two narratives that draw extensively from the repertoire of Soviet geopolitics. Whilst the first Marxist-Leninist storyline revives the early USSR's geopolitical position as a young state in the midst of a dystopian Western capitalism, the second one is familiar from the dying days of the Soviet empire and tells the story of a state that lies at the centre of a utopian common European house. The conclusion assesses the neo-Marxist concept of the 'anti-geopolitical', but finds it to have difficulties in accounting for the struggle of the Belarusian opposition.
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