This chapter is focused on the ideology of Pan-Russian World (Russkij mir) as the key driver of Russian imperial nationalism; that is, the way Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin define and perceive Russia’s place and role vis-à-vis Ukraine and in international relations. The ideology of the Pan-Russian World drew on the formulation of this concept by the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian imperial nationalists in the 1990s and evolved in the 2000s when Putin moved to the nationalist right during the first critical juncture of his rule following the Georgian Rose and Ukrainian Orange Revolutions. The Pan-Russian World evolved in three main dimensions. The first was the institutionalisation of symbolic space and shaping the institutional base for the Pan-Russian World. The second was the evolution of Pan-Russian World ideology from the early 1990s to the 2022 full-scale invasion and since. The third, was a growing obsession of the ideology and institutions of the Pan-Russian World with the ‘Ukrainian question’. Combined, they provide an explanation of the ideological legitimisation of Russian imperial nationalism and military aggression towards Ukraine.

Black and Afro-Indigenous life overlaps with the social and ecological lives of oilseeds in coastal Guerrero. This chapter uses oilseed plants, such as sesame, coconuts, and cotton, to analyze structural aspects of the Afro-Mexican experience. By following oilseeds in agrarian, economic, and local archives, this chapter demonstrates that plants provide archival and botanical evidence of racialized landscapes and landscapes of freedom. Oilseed landscapes are living legacies of slavery, plantations, and resistance. Taking inspiration from the way paleoclimatologists tell stories from natural archives such as ice cores, tree rings, and lake bed cores, this chapter presents oilseeds as an archival proxy to study socioenvironmental change but in tropical regions. A political ecology approach to the political economy of oilseeds demonstrates that Afro-descendant communities did more than exist; their labor and knowledge of oilseeds shaped socioeconomic development and politics on the coast.

The four roots of Russia’s war against Ukraine are Imperial Nationalism, Nostalgia, Divergence and Xenophobia. Imperial Nationalism is an extreme form of nationalism fused with imperialism and revanchism. The revival and promotion of White Russian émigré ideas, writings, and ideologues, spread a denial of the existence of a Ukrainian people distinct from Russians and a belief that Ukraine was an artificial construct and puppet state of the West. Nostalgia is analysed through the religious promotion of the Great Patriotic War, personality cult of dictator Joseph Stalin and revival of Soviet era propaganda against ‘Ukrainian nationalists’ and ‘Nazis’. The Soviet regime and Russia accuse Ukrainians of being ‘Nazis’ who did not see Ukraine’s future in the USSR and who do not see Ukraine’s future in the Russian World and Eurasia. Since 1991, Russia and Ukraine have diverged in their identity and political systems. Until 2013, Ukrainian and pan-Russian identity competed in Ukraine, but from 2014, Ukrainian identity became dominant and pan-Russian identity marginalised. Since 1991, Russia and Ukraine have diverged politically into a fascist dictatorship and democracy, respectively. Xenophobia lies in the Kremlin linking ‘artificial’ Ukrainian identity being buttressed by the West. Having established military alliances with China, Iran and North Korea, Russia is seeking the destruction of the US-led unipolar world and its replacement with a multipolar world.

This chapter asks how Mexicans remembered the histories of slavery, abolition, and Afro-descendants once independence was achieved, slavery abolished, and calidad classifications prohibited by law. Through an examination of the Mexican press between 1821 and 1860, this work traces the creation of historical narratives that downplayed the importance of slavery for Mexican history, while at the same time used the figure of Afro-Mexicans to cement different political projects. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to document that these subjects remained being part of Mexican public life through the press. More than restoring these questions’ visibility in Mexican history, the relevance of an analysis such as this rests on exposing the political uses and rhetorical power these themes had during that period. Slavery, abolition, and Afro-Mexicans’ presence in the country were points of reference in the creation of national identities and historical narratives that still bear weight in modern Mexican society.

This chapter delves into the political implications of data production on social media platforms on regime stability. It first investigates the meaning of political trust as a measure for regime stability. It then elaborates on political trust in China and lays out expectations about the role of benevolent leadership and citizens’ experiences on social media. The main empirical analysis concentrates on user experiences regarding space for online discourse and the diversity of opinions expressed on WeChat. The chapter finds that user experience of a less controlled and more diverse online discourse on WeChat is positively related to political trust in the regime. These empirical findings hold for political discourse, across digital platforms, and when content control undergoes changes over time. This analysis shows that user experiences greatly vary in terms of how much overt content control people encounter and the extent to which online discourse is seen as giving voice to diverse views and opinions. This variation feeds into how citizens evaluate the central government. Experiencing social media platforms as less controlled and more diverse aids in the creation of a positive vision of a benevolent central government, thus boosting support for the regime.

This chapter draws on past theories of ownership structure in the oil sector and applies them to the alluvial diamond sector in Zimbabwe. The alluvial diamond sector in Zimbabwe presents a natural experiment for understanding ownership structure in that the state and ruling party have been the same since 2006. Still, at least six different ownership regimes have been attempted. This chapter traces each of these and examines how the unpredictability of ownership in the diamond sector has often led to large-scale diamond smuggling and a regulatory framework reflective of political dynamics. The unpredictability of ownership has, in and of itself, caused difficulty in the Zimbabwean diamond sector and has reflected the unpredictability of state institutions. Thus, this chapter argues that past approaches that have been developed to examine the oil sector of states have some relevance for states that have a large amount of alluvial diamond wealth. However, the unique ability for a large amount of diamond wealth to be smuggled into a small space has made the significant increase in diamond wealth since 2006 a challenge for the formal economy and state capacity.

This chapter examines the postrevolutionary process of redefining who and what was Mexican, which led to the incorporation of the indigenous and erasure of blackness. Drawing first on my readings of two of Alfredo Ramos Martínez’s (1871–1946) paintings and his personal history, I juxtapose them to the ideas of his friend and secretario de educación boss, José Vasconcelos, and the policies Ramos Martínez put in place as director of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. I argue that his rejection of Europeanesque methodologies, focus on process and place of making art, and expansion of who could be an artist reimagined the indigenous as the nation’s true autochthonous subjects and rural areas as sites of such traditions. Thus, the chapter shows not just Ramos Martínez’s impact on postrevolutionary Mexicanness, but how ideas from his own work and life experience made this redefinition an intimate and seemingly local process.