A lecture by Professor Christopher Rossi (UiT), arranged by the research group "Pax Slavica in Flux" (PSIF), formerly known as "Russian Space?"
Bio: Christopher Rossi is a professor of international law and international relations. He teaches at UiT, The Arctic University of Norway and is an associate member of the Aurora Center at the Norwegian Center for the Law of the Sea. He has taught at the University of Iowa College of Law, Pusan National University, and American University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Remoteness Reconsidered: The Atacama Desert and International Law (University of Michigan Press, 2021), Whiggish International Law: Elihu Root, the Monroe Doctrine, and International Law in the Americas (Brill/Nijhoff, 2019), Sovereignty and Territorial Temptation (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Broken Chain of Being, James Brown Scott and the Origins of International Law (Kluwer Law International, 1998), Equity and International Law (Transnational, 1991), and has edited or co-edited volumes on Latin America, global security, and international criminal law. He has written on polar affairs, international legal history, the law of war, border disputes, forced migration, and problems of international law and climate change. He has served as chief rapporteur for three World Law Congresses and served in the Clinton Administration White House as Director of National Security for Human Rights, Democracy, and Humanitarian Affairs. Chris has his Ph.D. and M.A. from The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, an LL.M. from King’s College London, a J.D. from the University of Iowa, and a B.A. from Washington University. Most of his journal publications can be found here and here.
Abstract: Russia’s cultural construction of Siberia up to the late imperial period involved complex anxieties about culture, race, colonization, and the meaning of Russianness. Russian national identity conjoined highly contrasting and volatile images of Siberia, projecting it as a “terra incognita,” a “promised land,” and a mercantile colony. By the early nineteenth century, Siberia’s economic significance waned with the declining fur trade. Its lack of infrastructure and development oriented Russian interests toward Western Europe. Perceptions arose of Siberia as a stagnant Asiatic environment and a place of exile, except among nationalists, who embraced the expanse with a radically de-Europeanized vision.
While Russia’s Tsars turned Russia into the world’s largest country, its Bolshevik successors had the improbable task of harnessing the great Siberian landscape. This lecture explores the supremely distorted economic geography of Siberia and the pull between East and West and Russia’s internal center-periphery gradients. Its purpose is to explore the paradoxes of Central Asia’s resource-rich yet uneven geographical development and how the conquest over Siberia and its peoples has shaped Russia’s anxieties about its control over the Arctic.