For a variety of political, climatic, ecological, security-related and other reasons, the Russian summer resort of Sochi by the Black Sea would seem a most unlikely candidate for the Olympic Winter Games. Despite this, the Games will be held there in February 2014, and the Russian leaders regard the Games as a highly prestigious project underlining Russia’s return to a status of great power in the contemporary world. This book conducts a thorough inventory of the contexts, characteristics and challenges facing the Sochi Games. It deals with the problems from Russian, Georgian, Abkhazian and Circassian perspectives and makes in-depth analyses of profound challenges related to matters such as identity, security, and ethnic relations. The book brings together an international group of eminent scholars representing different disciplinary perspectives, including political science, sports science, ethics, ethnology, and Caucasian studies.

Using the Russian president’s major public addresses as the main source, Bo Petersson analyzes the legitimization strategies employed during Vladimir Putin’s third and fourth terms in office. The argument is that these strategies have rested on Putin’s highly personalized blend of strongman-image projection and presentation as the embodiment of Russia’s great power myth. Putin appears as the only credible guarantor against renewed weakness, political chaos, and interference from abroad—in particular from the US. After a first deep crisis of legitimacy manifested itself by the massive protests in 2011–2012, the annexation of Crimea led to a lengthy boost in Putin’s popularity figures. The book discusses how the Crimea effect is, by 2021, trailing off and Putin’s charismatic authority is increasingly questioned by opposition from Alexei Navalny, the effects of unpopular reforms, and poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, Russia is bound to head for a succession crisis as the legitimacy of the political system continues to be built on Putin’s projected personal characteristics and—now apparently waning—charisma, and since no potential heir apparent has been allowed on center stage. The constitutional reform of summer 2020 made it possible in theory for Putin to continue as president until 2036. Yet, this change did not address the Russian political system’s fundamental future leadership dilemma.

This volume brings to the fore the spatial dimension of specific places and sites, and assesses how they condition – and are conditioned by – conflict and peace processes. By marrying spatial theories with theories of peace and conflict, the contributors propose a new research agenda to investigate where peace and conflict take place.

In this book, Edenborg studies contemporary conflicts of community as enacted in Russian media, from the ‘homosexual propaganda’ laws to the Sochi Olympics and the Ukraine war, and explores the role of visibility in the production and contestation of belonging to a political community. The book examines what it is that determines which subjects and narratives become visible and which are occluded in public spheres; how they are seen and made intelligible; and how those processes are involved in the imagination of communities. Investigating the differentiated consequences of visibility, Edenborg discusses what forms of visibility make belonging possible and what forms of visibility may be related to exclusion or violence. The book maps and analyses the practices and mechanisms whereby a state seeks to produce and shape belonging through controlling what becomes visible in public, and how that which becomes visible is seen and understood. In addition, it examines what forms contestation can take and what its effects may be. Advancing theoretical understanding and offering a useful way to analytically conceptualize the role of visibility in the production and contestation of political communities, this work will be of interest to students and scholars of gender and sexuality politics, borders, citizenship, nationalism, migration and ethnic relations.

President Vladimir Putin’s Olympic venture put the workings of contemporary Russia on vivid display. The Sochi Olympics were designed to symbolize Russia’s return to great power status, but subsequent aggression against Ukraine, large-scale corruption, and the doping scandal have become the true legacies of the games. The Kremlin’s style of governance through mega-projects has had deleterious consequences for the country’s development. Placing the Sochi games into the larger context of Olympic history, this book examines the political, security, business, ethnic, societal, and international ramifications of Putin’s system.

Using previously inaccessible archival documents, this study provides a longitudinal investigation of the middle levels of Soviet bureaucracy responsible for overseeing Olympic Sport during the Cold War. Spanning the period from the USSR’s Olympic debut in 1952 through the 1980 Games held in Moscow, this book argues that behind the high-profile performances of Soviet elite athletes, a legion of sports administrators worked within international sports organizations and the Soviet party-state to increase Soviet chances of success and make Soviet representatives a respected voice in international sports. Soviet officials helped expand the Olympic movement, increasing the participation of women, developing nations, and socialist bloc countries, while achieving Soviet political and diplomatic aims. Soviet representatives, over the course of only a few decades, became a dominant and respected voice within international sports circles, actively promoting Olympic ideals abroad even as they transformed those ideals to better align with Soviet goals. In the process, Soviet sports contributed to the evolution of Olympic sport, integrating the Soviet Union into an emerging global culture, and contributing to transformations within the Soviet Union. Back home in the USSR, the Sports Committee's leading personalities represented a new kind of Soviet bureaucrat, who emerged in the late years of Stalinism and contributed to the professionalization of party-state apparatus. Standing at the intersection between state and society, between Soviet political goals and their execution, and between Olympic sport and Communist ideology, mid-level Soviet sports administrators demonstrated ideological drive, political savvy, and professional pragmatism, providing the impetus, expertise, and experience to transform broad ideological constructs into specific policies and procedures in the Soviet Union and realize Soviet propaganda and foreign policy goals in international and Olympic sports.

Many Circassian people have been living in diaspora for more than 150 years. They were forcefully driven out of their homeland by a combination of military and political methods. In this book, author Adel Bashqawi explains the origins, details and outcomes of the Russian-Circassian war and how it was directly responsible for the current situation of Circassians. He discusses the crimes and human rights violations committed against Circassians. The author sheds light on the evolution of the political situation of Circassians in the homeland and in diaspora until the current day, including the various Circassian political bodies. The author also deals with the issue of the Circassian identity and possible legal methods that Circassians can utilize to regain their rights. This book will teach Circassians, young and old, about their history and the history of their homeland. It is a must read for anyone who is interested in the Circassian issue and for anyone who cares about human rights.