MILITARY TOPICS IN RUSSIAN SOCIO-GEOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH: APPROACHES, TRENDS, PRIORITIES

Abstract

The article discusses the factors, trends, research approaches, and priorities for the development of ‘military subjects’ in Russian human geography. The focus of the analysis is both a prolonged retrospective (since the first half of the 19th century) and current processes, including relevant aspects of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Priority attention is paid to the peculiarities of the formation and development in Russia of a special geographical subdiscipline – military geography, as well as the evolution of its basic methodological postulates (considered in the context of global trends). Russian military geography, having initially been one of the drivers of the development of Russian geographical science as a whole, has been on the periphery of scientific search since the middle of the 20th century; the increasing distancing from other (non-military) sections of geography (primarily those related to social studies) has become one of the basic factors (and manifestations) of actual stagnation and marginalization of military geographical research. The paper shows that the metamorphoses of the nature of ‘war’ manifested in the last decades (as well as its reflection by society), complemented by the increasing role of the ‘military component’ in the spatial organization of society, initiate the necessary transition to an extremely broad understanding of the scope of ‘military geography’, whose subject-object sphere is designed to comprise the totality of not only geographical aspects of military activity but also military operations themselves, with priority attention to spatial determinants, consequences as well as structures of war (military districts, theaters of military operations, military landscapes, etc.). It is emphasized that in modern Russia, there are both multidimensional prerequisites for the further development of military geographical research (including in line with the ‘geopoliticization’ of science) and significant barriers (informational, institutional, moral and mental) to their cultivation within human geography.