As GeoCurrents reported in the past, native peoples of the Russian Far North struggle to fit into the modern global village while retaining their ethnic identity and cultural distinctiveness. In recent days, the situation seems to have rapidly changed for the worse, with Moscow threatening to close an indigenous peoples’ NGO and with the director of the Pomor Institute in Archangelsk being accused of treason.

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(Continued) The most glaring error in the linguistic map of western Russia and environs by Bouckaert et al. concerns the labeling of Belarus. The number “22,” placed in the center of the country, is listed as signifying the “Czech E,” which presumably means “eastern Czech.” As the authors have correspondingly appended the label “Byelorussian” to a small area in the ...

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As our criticisms of Bouckaert et al. have been extremely harsh, we must justify them in some detail. I have accused the authors of erring “at every turn,” a charge that reeks of hyperbole. But even if that claim is exaggerated, it is still not too far from the mark. To demonstrate the extraordinary density of error in the Science ...

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In diagramming the area of French sovereignty, I was not sure what to call the region constituted by the regular departments of France (both those in “Metropolitan France” and those located overseas); in the end I opted for “France Proper,” but it seems that there must be a better term. Some sources, including Wikipedia, place Corsica within “l’Hexagone,” but such ...

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As promised, I have posted a diagram of the “greater U.S. realm.” It is a little less map-like than the diagram of “greater UK” posted last week, as it does not differentiate east from west in regard to the placement of labels. I was uncertain as to how to classify Guantanamo Bay. I have included it, alone among U.S. foreign military ...

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While contemplating Seth Jackson’s post on the lands of the British Crown, it occurred to me that a map-like diagram would be helpful for visualizing the geopolitical complexity that he described. I have posted here an attempt to do so. Feedback is welcome. I have put a heavy black line around the “area of British sovereignty” to stress that this is ...

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Dear Readers, Although GeoCurrents does not normally accept guest posts, I was so taken by this piece by Seth Jackson that I decided to make an exception. One of the main themes of this website is geopolitical complexity, and here we have it in spades! Martin W. Lewis   The Crown Dependencies: What Exactly Are They? By Seth Jackson We often hear that the Isle of ...

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On May 24, debates in Ukraine’s Parliament, the Rada, turned physical after members of opposition parties blocked access to the podium for the ruling Regions party lawmakers who sought to defend a language law.

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As noted in an earlier GeoNote, many Russian nationalists see the their country in the future breaking into its constituent parts rather than enlarging at the expense of neighboring states. In some instances, such as the ones discussed in the earlier GeoNote, the xenophobic worries of such nationalists focus on religious minorities, especially Muslims, as being too “foreign” for a ...

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While Israel serves as a gathering place for the world-wide Jewish diaspora, it too hosts smaller diasporic communities of its own. One such community is that of the Circassians. Members of this community live in two villages: Kfar-Kama in the lower Galilee (population 2,900) and Reyhaniye further north, on the border with Syria (population 1,000). The roots of this community ...

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