This issue concludes Ab Imperio’s 2019 annual program “Hybrid Conflicts and Diverse Societies: Civil Wars and Global Peace,” which tackles the ambivalent role of conflict that both tears apart communities and reconstitutes groupness through social mobilization. Another ambiguity of conflict concerns its ability to erase the fundamental difference between the local and the global, which is the focus of this issue: “Adjusting Scale: Global Conflicts – Local Consequences, and Vice Versa.”
The seemingly neutral concept of scale becomes slippery when it comes to society. Referring to the physical and hence objective category of size for its substantiation, scale is used to validate qualitative differentiations of major significance. The inequality of status and rights becomes rendered as a difference in importance between large and small collectives, those deemed typical and parochial. This faulty logic is best demonstrated by the binary opposition of the majority and minority, which also reveals the elusiveness of the rigid distinction between things global and local: a truly global phenomenon, minority is ubiquitous at the local level and often brings about global repercussions. Both minority and majority are historical concepts that appear at a specific moment in history and whose semantics evolved historically. To this day, one of the most useful introductions to the history of the concept of minority is “Minorities, Majorities and the Nation-State,” chapter 1 of Benjamin Thomas White’s 2011 book The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria. Its Russian translation is published in the “Methodology and Theory” section of this issue. White demonstrates that minority and majority in their modern meaning are very recent terms that gained prominence sometime around World War I, with the spread of modern nation-states. These concepts were meaningless in the structural imperial situation of multidimensional and uncoordinated diversity that characterized societies of the “old regime.” Politically overloaded and analytically misleading in modern societies, “minority” and “majority” are even more meaningless when applied retrospectively to the past.
The “History” section features a thematic bloc, “Siberia in Global Context: Space, Diversity, and Subjectivity in the History of the Region.” Three articles included in the bloc present complex visions of conflicts that they discuss as epiphenomena of simultaneously local and global contexts. Thus, Chechesh Kudachinova argues that individual exploratory expeditions of Muscovite servitors in seventeenth-century Siberia were, unwittingly, episodes of global transcontinental silver trade and the circulation of sociopolitical ideas and spatial imaginary. Throughout much of the century, the primary motivation of the Russian government’s support of Siberia’s colonization was the pursuit of silver, which was believed to be abundant in that land. The universal colonial trope of El Dorado overlapped with the cameralist ideal of mining silver as a key to achieving the country’s economic self-sufficiency and with vague local legends to coalesce in a persistent dream of the silver mountain. The pursuit of this elusive silver mountain drove Muscovite explorers across the northeastern stretches of the continent, which became conceived of as a spatial and political entity (Siberia) only as a result of this experience. Any silver that Muscovites encountered in the settlements of indigenous peoples came from their trade with the Mongols, who received silver through exchange with Qing China, which obtained it from European merchants transporting South American silver on their ships. Thus, the quest for a domestic silver mountain in reality was not only framed by the global imaginary but also substantiated by samplings of American silver. Frustrated by the failure to find silver, Muscovite colonizers compensated themselves by extracting fur pelts from the local population and capturing slaves. They also used physical coercion to obtain information regarding the whereabouts of the silver mountain. This is how local conflicts became interwoven with global ones, producing an entangled complex of colonial knowledge and space, both universal and parochial in its blending of violence and knowledge.
Mikhail Agapov’s article discusses a different conflict. In Western Siberia in the 1860s, Russians perceived themselves as Siberian locals neglected by the imperial metropole. Those who did not opt to consider their land as a colony promoted the nationalist political and economic agenda as a way of reintegrating into the European metropole. Nationalist-minded Siberian entrepreneurs called for protectionist economic policies to foster the region’s development as well as to achieve personal commercial gains. By exploiting foreign policy security concerns, they attempted to minimize the competition of rival foreign merchants and obtain fiscal preferences or even investments for themselves. Local commercial interests and conflicts were elevated to the level of Russia’s national interests, whereas the latter were appraised in terms of concrete profit margins for individual “nationally thinking” entrepreneurs. Despite the overall failure to monetize their nationalism, Siberian businessmen–writers of the 1860s succeeded in developing an elaborated rhetoric of national economic isolationism, which persists in Russia today.
The third article in the bloc, by Egor Antonov and Venera Antonova, revisits the national and territorial delimitation of the northeastern regions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) in the 1920s and early 1930s. The ongoing historiographic debate about early Soviet nationality policy is framed by the competing visions of its primary subjects: prerevolutionary national elites or the Bolshevik regime and experts in its service. The Antonovs’ article introduces the logic of economic regionalization as the third factor in this contested process, which is inseparable from national projects and equally affects the reasoning of politicians and experts at the local level and in Moscow. Specifically, the article explores the negotiation of the territorial borders of Yakut (Sakha) national territorial autonomy in the context of the economic regionalization debate in the Soviet Union and in the framework of the relationship between the Soviet center, regional authorities of the Far Eastern region and Yakut Autonomous Republic, and activists of smaller Eastern Siberian nationalities. Economic considerations were inseparable from national claims on the territory, which themselves were challenged by different indigenous groups. The Yakuts aspired to represent the ultimate subaltern nation of the region, eligible for the Soviet “affirmative action” policy. However, in the eyes of smaller Siberian indigenous peoples and Russian Far Eastern regional authorities, Yakuts themselves were an economically and culturally hegemonic group that had to yield part of their territory and power to “minorities.” The ambiguous duality of the majority and minority as discussed by White in his chapter is vividly illustrated by the Antonovs’ article. In the structural imperial situation, a local clash over an administrative border or a gold mine became inseparable from a global conflict over the essence and direction of the Soviet nationality policy.
Much of this analysis dwells on the conceptual work and case studies of various historical regimes of human diversity by the renowned academic couple, the Russianist Jane Burbank and Africanist Fred Cooper. Their seminal Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010) has become an important milestone in modern analyses of complex societies and new imperial history. Celebrating their contribution to the field, Ab Imperio publishes materials pertaining to their retirement party held at New York University on February 20, 2020. We dedicate this issue to Jane and Fred and wish them many more productive years!