ABSTRACT
Since 2012, Russian authorities have introduced several laws on “foreign agents”. The first law, implemented in 2012, had a significant impact on the arena of civil society, as it obliged all non-governmental organisations that engage in political activities and receive funds from abroad to register as “foreign agents”. This chapter analyses the representation of the “foreign agent” in Russian newspapers from a critical geopolitics perspective. In contrast to “traditional” or “classical” geopolitics that seeks to explain the impact of geographic features on states’ foreign policies and actions, critical geopolitics focuses on the formal, practical and popular discourses about security, sovereignty and statecraft in order to understand how geographical claims function in politics. If, in the early 2000s, Russian security discourse was primarily concerned with combating international terrorism, the government’s discourse from the mid-2000s onwards assumes that external and internal threats are intertwined.
