Topographies of Power: Institutions, Territory, and Identity in Putin?s Russia.

This paper probes the relationship between space and power in the examination of the state's internal borders. Despite a growing body of scholarship on borders and borderlands in anthropology, political geography, history, and sociology, comparative politics has only recently started to grapple with the problem of borders. The literatures on state building, democratization, federalism, and cultural pluralism often assert the importance of borders, but this is usually presented in terms of overcoming "artificial" borders and coping with their constraining influence in crafting the political institutions that inhabit them. Comparative politics tends to treat borders as the static political outcomes such that stable borders are taken as given while territorial change appears as a dramatic rupture. In this sense, political science replicates the problem identified in anthropology by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson that "the presumption that [social and cultural] spaces are autonomous has enabled the power of topography to conceal successfully the topography of power." Drawing on insights from other social science disciplines, this paper argues that borders are not static outcomes but are productive and dynamic categories of political practices: institutional (the centralization or decentralization of governing institutions), spatial (the reduction or enlargement of social space), and social (the binding of community identity to territorial divisions of the state). This approach provides a means to conceptualize how changes to the territorial shape of the state become legitimate and compelling, even in cases where territorial divisions remain in place but the salience of borders is contested.These theoretical claims are examined in light of Russia's experience with state building and the manipulation of its internal borders. In accounting for why Russia stood on the brink of disintegration in the 1990s, most analysts neglected to account for why it managed to hold together. The tools developed for understanding regionalism in Russia left little room for explaining (much less predicting) how regional mobilization against the state might be contained or even reversed. In this regard, Vladimir Putin's rule has been striking for the speed and apparent ease with which the Kremlin managed to tame the regions. And contrary to expectations, regional leaders greeted the increasingly authoritarian re-centralization of power in the Kremlin not with jeers, but with applause. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in four Russian regions, the paper argues that the tide of regionalism was reversed by the activation of integrative practices along Russia's internal borders. The research makes an original contribution to the empirical literature on post-Soviet politics in accounting for the puzzling success of the Kremlin's regional policy under Putin. It further contributes to the theoretical understanding of borders in political science by conceptualizing the relationship of internal borders to regime type and processes of state formation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]