T his book could have had a very different ending. It was initially designed as an academic story of urban biopolitics, an innovative concept-in-the-making that seeks to explain how differently positioned cities produce and develop distinct politics of life. References to and connotations of ‘happy’, ‘productive’, and ‘enjoyable’ lives were supposed to add a sense of visionary optimism to the biopolitical narrative about the four urban stories of Lviv and Mariupol in Ukraine, and Tartu and Narva in Estonia. With all duly understood distinctions between the two countries, both share a constitutive structural characteristic – their national identities embrace the norms and values of European democracy, and are politically shaped by the European Union (EU) and, in a broader sense, by the Euro-Atlantic West. In the meantime, the two countries have to face the reality of multiple challenging encounters with the ‘Russian world’ in its various manifestations. The four cities selected as the main foci of this book are differently positioned along the East–West lines: two of them – the Ukrainian Mariupol and the Estonian Narva – find themselves on the border of Russia and are mostly populated by Russophones, while two others – Lviv and Tartu – are largely considered as hotbeds of Europeanization and, correspondingly, of Ukrainian and Estonian national, linguistic, and cultural identities.
The event of 24 February 2022 has thwarted this script. When the first draft of this book manuscript was almost ready, Russia launched a full-scale military invasion into Ukraine. In a matter of weeks, Mariupol was brutally destroyed by Russian troops. Lviv was bombarded many times by Russian aviation and turned into a major hub for millions of internally displaced Ukrainians and war refugees. Narva became a ‘window to Europe’ (Punamäe, Haabu and Martin 2022) for thousands of Ukrainians who were deported from the demolished Mariupol to Russia and were eager to find a better life in Estonia or another EU member state. Tartu exhibited a high level of solidarity with Ukraine and offered unprecedented protection and opportunities for Ukrainian war escapees.
As an effect of Russia’s aggression, symbolic links and discursive parallels between Estonia and Ukraine became parts of Estonian narratives: thus, in the words of a member of the Estonian parliament, ‘Narva and Kohtla-Järve are our Kherson and Mariupol’ (Sobolev 2022). This type of analogical reasoning opens a space for broader visions of similarities between the two countries, including debates about Estonia’s vulnerabilities vis-à-vis increasing Russian hybrid transgressions.1
Apart from a deeply human – and completely non-academic – feeling of anger and frustration, Russia’s war against Ukraine has posed several fundamental challenges for this study. How to continue narrating a biopolitical story when one of the objects of my research, the city of Mariupol, was destroyed by the Russian army, and thousands of its inhabitants were forced to flee to Tartu and Narva, as well as many other Estonian and European cities, in search of survival and a new life? And how can we keep engaging with the life-centric ideas of biopolitics in this time of war, with its huge human losses and the incredible inhumanity exposed by the Russian invaders?
Given the scale and the scope of the Russian attack, it was impossible to integrate its long-term repercussions into the previously drafted chapters. The war required new ones, containing a story of war-torn and war-affected urban biopolitics in two countries that, despite their dissimilar geopolitical positioning – one being fully integrated into the EU and NATO, while the other one is developing partnerships with these organizations – shared some important interconnections. To start with, it was Vladimir Putin who drew implicit parallels between the two countries, placing them in one chain of imperial equivalences: in June 2022, with the war against Ukraine in full swing, the Russian dictator referred to Peter the Great’s lengthy war against Sweden and the ensuing military conquest of Narva as a lucid example of the so-called historical reaggregation of Russian lands (Putin 2022). This peculiar type of imaginative parallel nicely reflected what might be dubbed Putin’s bio-temporality: he ontologized the biopolitical construct of the Russian world and projected it back into Russian colonial times, thus normalizing wars and violence through the Russian equivalent of Lebensraum, or ‘living space’.
Meanwhile, critical discourses and imageries constructed their own counterhegemonic chains of equivalences aimed at detaching both Estonia and Ukraine from the Kremlin’s concept of ‘near abroad’, which is the Russian version of spheres of influence. This affected urban biopolitical strategies as well, particularly when it comes to developing European lifestyles, or ways of life in urban spaces that, in one way or another, seek to distance themselves – and secure a certain degree of autonomy – from the sphere of sovereign politics, and become immersed into what Giorgio Agamben dubbed a ‘happy life’, that by and large has remained a symbolic ideal for each of the cities.
Perhaps one of the most metaphorical liaisons between the two countries was proposed by the Estonian artist Kristina Norman in her two 2014 artworks, both premised on a similarity of urban spaces in Kyiv and St Petersburg. One video installation, titled ‘Iron Arch’, was part of the Manifesta 10 project. It featured a female narrator walking through the centre of St Petersburg and routinely telling an obviously imagined story that almost literally mirrors the Maidan revolt in Kyiv as if it had happened in Russia. The protagonist of the video points to ordinary houses, parks, and squares in St Petersburg, pretending that just recently a violent clash between protestors and the police took place, having left its almost invisible traces on buildings and trees. The peaceful urban reality thus turned into a space for a politically dystopian fantasy coloured in nuanced postcolonial overtones.2
Another performance, named ‘Souvenir’,3 represented an artificial Christmas tree installed, again, in the very centre of St Petersburg as part of an international art festival: a hidden allusion to the famous Christmas tree in Kyiv that was one of the most recognizable symbols of the Maidan revolution. As in the ‘Iron Arch’, Kristina Norman imaginatively plays with the seemingly similar urban topographies in St Petersburg and Kyiv, using the Russian mythology of ‘brotherly’ relations between Russia and Ukraine to imagine the spillover of the Revolution of Dignity to Russia itself. On the one hand, Norman symbolically visualizes Estonian mainstream discourse: her imagery has to be read as an explicit artistic gesture of solidarity with Ukraine and the victims of the brutality of the pro-Russian regime of Viktor Yanukovich. Arguably, ‘Norman’s decision to erect a similar structure in St. Petersburg was an invitation to the people of St. Petersburg to appropriate and re-signify this tree’ (Laanes 2020). Yet, on the other hand, St Petersburg undeniably exemplifies the Russian imperial legacy which in 2014 transformed into direct military, political, and financial support for separatists in Donbas,4 which makes the projection of the unique Ukrainian experience of Maidan onto Russia quite controversial. Even more problematic is the very attempt to imagine a frame within which Ukraine and Russia might be juxtaposed with each other, given the war that had already started in 2014.
Another parallel followed suit. In November 2022 the Russia-born theatre director Yulia Aug staged a documentary spectacle titled ‘Narva: A City We Have Lost’, in which she pointed to a direct parallel between the demolition of this Estonian city in 1944 by Soviet troops and the destruction of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol by the Russian army in spring 2022. This necropolitical analogy remained tangential and still lacked a strong aesthetic or artistic interpretation, but it supported the perception of a new geopolitical reality at Europe’s eastern edges: ‘The continent is once again being split by an iron curtain, this time stretching from Narva on the Baltic to Mariupol on the Sea of Azov’ (Sakwa n.d.).
A sense of symbolic solidarity between the two cities was lucidly accentuated by a new web-based project named ‘Reflection’ produced by the art group ‘Art Republic Krenholmia’.5 The project puts together a series of video-recorded interviews with refugees from Mariupol who emigrated to Europe through Narva and stayed in Estonia for some time. These parallels are part of a broader comparative frame juxtaposing Estonia and Ukraine as victims of Russia’s force projection.6
These cultural preludes are important starting points for this book, which offers a combination of theoretical engagements with the nascent concept of urban biopolitics, and empirical material that explains how this concept works in the cases of Estonia and Ukraine. Urban biopolitics allows us to see how the agency of various groups of urban populations comes to life and why their lifestyles matter for political agendas and calculations. Drawing on the idea of biopower and projecting it into the realm of the city, this book explains the interconnections between geopolitical factors (Russia’s war on Ukraine, and membership of European institutions in the case of Estonia) and urban biopolitical governance.
Urban biopolitics is a relatively new field of research that builds on the existing understanding of biopolitics as a set of different modalities and figurations for governing (managing, controlling, monitoring, regulating, categorizing, but also caretaking and incentivizing) human bodies. Biopolitics is meant to integrate life (and thus the realm of corporeality) into political calculations and agendas. The idea of urban biopolitics is heavily affected by what the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben would have called ‘forms of life’ in the city, as well as neoliberal and postpolitical policies targeting different categorizations of life – emotional, intimate, enjoyable, ‘sensible’; all of them aimed at the cultivation of ‘positive feelings’ through ‘liveability’ and ‘conviviality’ (Kraftl 2014) – but it also has to be adjusted to situations of multiple crises and conflicts that affect urban populations.
Urban biopolitics is an open concept and might mean different things to different scholars – from multispecies urban relations (Towne Hirtenfelder 2022) to the role of architecture in shaping urban lifestyles (Cooper 2022). Most of the authors who use – rather tangentially – the concept of urban biopolitics do so through the prism of technologies of governance conducive to the so-called ‘happy life’. In this book I try to further problematize this conceptual metaphor and deploy it in a more complex set of geo- and biopolitical relations shaped by the concept of ‘biopolitical war’ – in Julian Reid’s words, ‘a war of the biological type… waged… against [specific] ways of life’ (Reid 2006: 147–48) – with the re-emerging practices of rebordering and recolonization unheard of for many decades in Europe.
In this light I focus on cities’ different positionalities in spatial and geopolitical terms and the concomitant production/construction of relations of biopolitical belonging and abandonment, along with ‘sovereign life’ and ‘bare life’. I look at how the (re)construction of geopolitical spaces at Europe’s eastern margins impacts upon – or correlates with – the biopolitical dynamics from below. More specifically, in Estonia I discuss how two cities, Narva and Tartu, as contenders for the title of European Capital of Culture 2024, have been distinctly constructing their urban development strategies, with different effects for the domain of biopolitics. In Ukraine, the two contrasting cases are Lviv in the west and Mariupol in the east of the country; their juxtaposed stories, deployed in two different geopolitical and spatial contexts, expose different meanings of urban biopolitics in the hyper-securitized situation Ukraine has had to face since the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the war by proxies on Donbas.
Therefore, the book aims to compare Estonia and Ukraine, two borderland countries that have differently experienced what might be dubbed a ‘colonial-based articulation of power over bodies, spaces and mentalities’ (Certomà 2015). Evidently, the two countries are dissimilarly positioned institutionally and in terms of security; Estonia is a member of the EU and NATO, with the corresponding (geo)political and economic effects, while Ukraine is struggling to escape the ‘grey zone’ of peripherality and marginality by associating itself with Western centres of power, thus striving to detach itself from Russia’s malign influence. Despite these meaningful distinctions, both countries are spatially heterogeneous, which is differently exemplified by the contrasting and divergent trajectories of the cities of Narva and Tartu in Estonia, and Mariupol and Lviv in Ukraine. In both cases, the Russia–Europe dichotomy plays important yet dissimilar roles: Narva tried to make its transborder connections with Russia its selling point, while for Mariupol for several years Russia was a primordial source of immanent – although still underestimated until 24 February 2022 – military threat. When it comes to Lviv and Tartu, these two cities, with their urban strategies open to Europeanization, Westernization, and globalization, are in the meantime epitomes and hotbeds of Ukrainian and Estonian national identities and traditions.
The book contains a multidisciplinary comparative analysis of two countries – Estonia and Ukraine – from the viewpoint of urban biopolitics, which allows us to see how various groups of urban populations come into life and why their lifestyles matter for political calculations. Drawing on the idea of biopower and applying it to the realm of the city, I try to explain the interconnections between geopolitical factors (military conflict with Russia in the case of Ukraine, and membership in European institutions in the case of Estonia) and urban biopolitical governance. The stories of urban biopolitics to be told in this book are stories of different forms of marginality simultaneously as a productive force and as a ‘grey zone’ of insecurity and vulnerability vis-à-vis Russian transgressions.
Two major questions frame the research agenda. First, the book aims to find out how multifaceted and variegated biopolitical scholarship might be helpful in explaining the intricacies of urban spatialities. In other words, how might biopolitical concepts be projected onto urban studies and what can these projections elucidate? Second, this study seeks to discuss how the four urban cases contribute to further developing, deepening, and broadening biopolitical conceptualizations of urban spaces, borders, and identities.
The book is comprised of four chapters. Chapter 1 frames the study theoretically, introduces the key concepts of biopolitical scholarship, and highlights those that are most useful for urban biopolitics. Chapter 2 starts the empirical part of the monograph with analysis of the Estonian case using concepts such as cultural biopolitics (the section on Tartu) and bare life (the section on Narva). The focal point of Chapter 3 is Ukraine before the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022, with two case studies of urban biopolitics requiring concepts such as governmentality, biopolitical bordering, the state of exception from below, normalization, and happy life. Chapter 4 discusses the impacts of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine on the four cities, which necessitates concepts such as necropolitics, zoēpolitics, homines sacri, inclusive exclusion, heterotopia, and testimony. To conclude, I summarize my findings and discuss how urban biopolitics might be further theorized.