The accession of Sweden and Finland to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is typically seen as a serious geopolitical setback for Russia, the opposite of its goals to limit the alliance’s spread eastwards. In contrast to Moscow’s stances on Ukraine and Georgia, however, its reaction to NATO’s Nordic expansion is more ambiguous. This article uses the framework of critical geopolitics to analyse several layers of Russia’s discursive reaction: practical, formal, and popular. This study finds that much of the popular geopolitics continues pre-2022 trends, presenting a securitised and nationalistic construction of NATO as a threatening ‘Other’. On the other hand, more moderate and pragmatic assessments in formal geopolitics balance against bellicosity and highlight the agency of the Nordic states, suggesting Russia may return to peaceful cooperation. In practical geopolitics, there is a gap between discourse and practice. Alongside more negative official discourse on NATO Nordic expansion, there was also reduced Russian military activity and an avoidance of provocative steps. These two faces – realism and pragmatism as opposed to securitised and nationalistic threat deterrence – reflect the structure of Russian geopolitical culture when it is applied to the North and Nordic NATO expansion.

This piece argues that to understand how cultural heritage functions as a form of power at the international level, it is essential to deconstruct the ‘productive politics’ that surround and shape the material and symbolic spatial formations of heritage and heritagisation. To this aim, by integrating critical accounts on heritage politics, geopolitics, and biopolitics, this piece deconstructs the dynamics of Turkey’s heritagisation of traditional Turkish archery (TTA) in Turkey and beyond. We introduce heritage geopolitics as a novel analytical framework to unpack the role of these multiple intertwined scales of spaces in heritagisation and the ‘productive politics’ behind it. Heritage geopolitics, explained through the heritagisation of TTA, helps to illustrate how heritagisation becomes a multiscalar hegemonic process that shapes various features of the domestic and international orders, from the biopolitical to the geopolitical, attempting to challenge existing narratives of power and moral authority. We demonstrate that heritage geopolitics differs from other uses of heritage in world politics (such as cultural diplomacy, heritage diplomacy, or soft power) by foregrounding the domestic and embodied moral foundations of biopolitical and geopolitical imaginations embedded in the heritagisation processes.

The government of Kyrgyzstan has embarked on an ambitious hydropower development programme on the transboundary Syr Darya River, which has provoked strong opposition from downstream Uzbekistan. The programme is driven by the alignment of actual energy concerns with interests of the national hydraulic elites and the global politics of project finance, which provides a logic for dams that may exacerbate existing geopolitical tensions across the region.

Turkey has adopted a new course in foreign policy toward Eurasia. This article employs the notion of geographic imagination to analyze how Turkish policy-makers have developed a new political rhetoric and foreign policy towards the Eurasian region, specifically Central Asia, the Caucasus and Russia. Turkish policy-makers aim to further Turkey's interests ranging from security, over regional trade, to energy issues in this geography, in addition to creating an environment of cooperation and eliminating regional power constellations. We conclude that Turkey's renewed activism has opened new horizons for its relations in this region and that this new foreign policy orientation is linked to reform and change in Turkey's domestic landscape.