News

Veli-Pekka’s article “Energy as Power—Gazprom, Gas Infrastructure, and Geo-governmentality in Putin’s Russia” was published in the new issue of Slavic Review.

This study unfolds the normalizing narrative that is constructed via the Gazifikatsiia Rossii promotional video released by Gazprom. The analysis reveals that the practiced geo-governmentality of gazifikatsiia derives its power from geographical imaginaries of Russia. This bipartite energopower and geo-governmentality receives its essence from the positive and negative materialities of hydrocarbons, the ability to do both “good” and “bad”, which unfolds the way the non-human is embedded in the construction of the social. This construction lumps together the material-nationalistic energy imagination, such as Russia as an energy Superpower, with universal goals such as economic growth and modernization, but also with values such as conservative gender roles. The rationalities and practices of gazifikatsiia geo-governmentality function in and combine several scales: the subject is tied to territories and the nation via gas, the subject is made responsible for the biosecurity of the population, and the global is harnessed in legitimizing the reliance on gas.

Read the article here.

Cultural Anthropology website published a new article “Russia’s Arctic Natural Gas and the Definition of Sustainability” by Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen.

Sustainability as a corporate governance objective entered the Russian energy sector in the early 2000s. Major state-owned companies began publishing corporate social responsibility and sustainability reports. Instead of examining these documents, though, I want to understand how sustainability is defined in advertisements directed at the broader public at home and abroad. I argue that the narrative of these advertisements better reflects how both companies and viewers understand sustainability. Advertisements, as a central component in branding that can represent how corporations actually think (see Moeran 2005), are a productive site for unmasking how Russian energy, political elites, and beliefs about commerce and responsibility are brought together.

The article is available online.

Baltic Rim Economies Review published in June a special issue on the future of the Arctic. Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen contributed an article “Russia’s Arctic paradoxes” to it. In the article, Professor Tynkkynen discusses the global, the national and the grass-root level paradoxes that Russia faces in the Arctic.

The article and the full volume are available here.

An open access scientific journal, Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene published a new co-authored by Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen article “Arctic air pollution: Challenges and opportunities for the next decade”.

The Arctic is a sentinel of global change. This region is influenced by multiple physical and socio-economic drivers and feedbacks, impacting both the natural and human environment. Air pollution is one such driver that impacts Arctic climate change, ecosystems and health but significant uncertainties still surround quantification of these effects. Arctic air pollution includes harmful trace gases (e.g. tropospheric ozone) and particles (e.g. black carbon, sulphate) and toxic substances (e.g. polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) that can be transported to the Arctic from emission sources located far outside the region, or emitted within the Arctic from activities including shipping, power production, and other industrial activities. This paper qualitatively summarizes the complex science issues motivating the creation of a new international initiative, PACES (air Pollution in the Arctic: Climate, Environment and Societies). Approaches for coordinated, international and interdisciplinary research on this topic are described with the goal to improve predictive capability via new understanding about sources, processes, feedbacks and impacts of Arctic air pollution. Overarching research actions are outlined, in which we describe our recommendations for 1) the development of trans-disciplinary approaches combining social and economic research with investigation of the chemical and physical aspects of Arctic air pollution; 2) increasing the quality and quantity of observations in the Arctic using long-term monitoring and intensive field studies, both at the surface and throughout the troposphere; and 3) developing improved predictive capability across a range of spatial and temporal scales.

The article is available at the journal website.