Russia's Food Security Doctrine strives to ensure food self-sufficiency for all people in all regions of Russia. Russia is a geographically diverse country. The article analyzes two dilemmas that arise from current food security policy: (1) Regional diversity in food production capacity, food production, and food demand does not align with policy goals and (2) Not all regions can be food self-sufficient. The Russian Far East illustrates the second dilemma. Nearly half of Russia's regions have no reasonable prospect of becoming food self-sufficient. The upshot is that a food security policy which aims for self-sufficiency in every region is not realistic.
This Comment takes the nine contributions in the Eurasian Geography and Economics Special Issue as a collective invitation to reflect on how we understand China's global engagements. Instead of treating the so-called "Global China" as a coherent, central Chinese state project radiating outward, the articles approach it as a constellation of situated, multi-scalar practices whose meanings and material effects emerge through uneven encounters among discourses, infrastructures, states, firms, and local political economic processes. Three cross-cutting themes have emerged. First, narratives as infrastructure attends to the production, reworking, and contestation of narratives about China, which demands a multi-lingual, multi-scalar approach to understanding how hegemonic storylines are affirmed, appropriated, or fractured across sites. Second, spatial forms as political technologies explores how material interventions of China, such as corridors, special economic zones, and investment flows, become territorial, anticipatory, and relational tools that fix authority in space, script future development trajectories, and reconfigure power relations across scales. Third, coalitional state capitalism unpacks state-capital relations as the ongoing construction of coalition through inter-governmental negotiations over trade, finance, and economic cooperation, inter-firm dynamics of hierarchy, complementarity, and competition, and project-level frictions over issues of land, labor, and equity. The Comment concludes by calling for comparative, grounded, and mixed-method research to capture the uneven, evolving, and often contradictory outcomes of China's global engagements.
China's mass rural-urban migration has been shaped by successive hukou reforms since 1978, particularly in major migrant destinations such as the Pearl River Delta (PRD). While existing studies have examined the institutional design and uneven outcomes of hukou reform, less attention has been paid to how migrants themselves understand and navigate these changes in everyday life. This paper addresses this gap by analysing hukou reform through the analytical lens of hukou "stickiness", defined as the persistent coupling between hukou status and access to urban benefits (fuli) despite formal reform efforts. Drawing on qualitative interviews and focus group discussions with rural-urban migrants in the PRD, the study shows that hukou stickiness continues to structure migrants' access to housing, education, and social security, shaping settlement intentions and long-term life planning. Reform unpredictability, uneven local implementation, and bureaucratic rigidity generate uncertainty, leading migrants to anticipate possible exclusion or policy reversal. In response, migrants adopt strategic behaviours to manage these institutional constraints. The findings of the article demonstrate that hukou stickiness operates as a key mechanism mediating reform outcomes at the local level, helping to explain why hukou reforms frequently weaken formal barriers without producing substantive improvements in migrants' access to urban benefits or stable urban settlement.
By exploiting the natural experiment of post-2022 sanctions against Russia, our study contributes to the sanctions literature by offering an empirical analysis of the determinants of the imposition of industry-specific trade sanctions from a cost-benefit point of view. We developed a specialized indicator designed to measure the intensity of trade sanctions imposed by the European Union (EU) and the U.S.A. against Russia in 2022-24, as a share of 2021 trade that would be affected by corresponding trade bans, by 2-digit HS product groups. Using econometric techniques, we show that the sanctioning countries strategically focus on restricting trade flows in order to exert maximum economic pressure on the Russian economy, including effects along value chains. This is consistent with the point of view that the probability of success of sanctions increases with economic harm to the target economy. At the same time, we get no empirical evidence in favor of the deterrent effect of costs related to sanctions. The sanctioning countries do not impose less-intensive restrictions on the trade flows that are economically important to their economies, which seems to indicate the firmness of their intentions.
Since its launch in 2015, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) has attracted growing scholarly attention, yet public attitudes toward this elite-driven regional organization remain underexplored. This article argues that public perceptions matter for the legitimacy of international organizations even in authoritarian settings. Focusing on Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, it examines how the EAEU is perceived a decade after its establishment, which factors shape these perceptions, and how they vary across countries. The analysis draws on original focus group discussions conducted in all three cases, complemented by secondary survey data. The findings show a steady decline in public support for the EAEU, with skepticism outweighing perceived benefits. Concerns over economic costs, unfair practices, and threats to national sovereignty dominate, producing divided preferences between withdrawal and "stay and reform." While core narratives are similar across cases, their salience differs, with criticism strongest in Kazakhstan, weakest in Kyrgyzstan, and intermediate in Armenia.
This study analyzes Uzbekistan's emissions-growth relationship from 1990 to 2023 using long-term data on GDP, CO2 emissions, and fuel composition. A multi-indicator approach, combining elasticity, intensity, and structural trend analysis, assesses whether observed efficiency gains derive from structural economic change or intentional climate policy. Results show consistent relative, and occasional near-absolute, decoupling driven primarily by modernization, fossil-to-fossil substitution, and gradual sectoral shifts rather than deliberate mitigation measures. These patterns illustrate a form of "passive decarbonization," where institutional and infrastructural evolution yields lower carbon intensity under weak policy conditions. This article distinguishes this from an emerging phase of "developmental decarbonization" associated with recent renewable and nuclear initiatives. Uzbekistan's experience illustrates how material conditions and geopolitical factors influence low-carbon transitions in semi-peripheral economies, offering valuable insights for analyzing similar energy transitions in Eurasia and the Global South.
This paper offers new critical insights into migration by instigating dialogue between longstanding interdisciplinary study of intimate, familial, and sexual relations and emerging scholarship on geographies of attachment. We do so via ethnographies of building workers in China and focus on couples as an under-theorized and -researched group. Specifically, we foreground non-human attachments of being and becoming a couple that constitute migrant' workers responses to, and shaping of, relations of power in and through mundane labor, domestic, and family struggles. Firstly, we analyze couples' attachments through affective economies and patterned relations with (grand)parents, siblings, children, colleagues, friends, ex-partners, and heterogeneous other non-human actors. Secondly, we interrogate forms, scenes, possibilities, promises, and intensities of couples' (de)attachments that infuse past, present, and future lives. Thirdly, we explore how being and becoming a couple' unsettles relational familial, personal, social, and intimate attachments. Overall, we contribute to interdisciplinary momentum in challenging de-humanizing impulses that eclipse the complexities of migrants' everyday lives. We conclude by signposting new avenues for research.
The emphasis on "discourse power" and "telling the China story" has been central to China's international engagement over the past decade. While existing scholarship has critically examined the projection of China's narratives, scant attention has been paid to how these narratives are contested, adapted, or fragmented across scales and audiences in partner countries. By deploying Bourdieu's concept of symbolic power, specifically its mechanisms of doxa, misrecognition, and illusio, the study develops a model to interrogate how China's narratives on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a key Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project, are projected and reconfigured within localized political and media ecosystems. Drawing on an original dataset of 6,133 articles in Chinese, Urdu, and English , the mixed-methods analysis reveals tensions between national elites' alignment with BRI optimism and provincial actors' critical scrutiny of distributive inequities and risks. These findings contribute to debates on global narrative diffusion by demonstrating how symbolic power operates unevenly across scales and places. Our study further highlights the methodological necessity of multiscalar and multilingual analysis to unpack the politics of development narratives, offering a replicable framework for interrogating discourse power.
As environmental and geopolitical crises deepen and global production networks (GPNs) reorganize, countries proximate to large consumer markets are becoming more attractive investment destinations. This argument has recently gained ground but lacks theoretical and empirical validation. This article opens up space for addressing this gap in two ways. Theoretically, it argues for conceptualizing proximity in multi-dimensional and macro-regional terms in the GPN literature, as this allows for a broader range of proximity benefits that firms might seek to exploit through nearshoring to be identified. Empirically, it performs a country-level panel data analysis of Italian and German nearshoring to Central and Eastern Europe between 2005 and 2019. The analysis found a significant correlation between nearshoring and environmental certification, while the results for regulatory and institutional certainty are inconclusive. The article concludes with a mixed-methods research agenda for the study of nearshoring as de-risking in economic geography.
The hegemonic discourse surrounding Chinese investments in Pakistan promotes a win-win situation. In this article, I argue that the hegemonic win-win discourse is crafted through the (re)production and recontextualization of multiple narratives. The narratives encompass such topics as bilateral relations, geopolitics, geoeconomics, and development and growth. The hegemonic discourse is constructed and disseminated by a power elite embedded within a network of institutions. The main finding of the study demonstrates that networks of the power elite and institutions wield discursive power that assimilate dissent within a "desire for more development" framework, thereby rendering dissent invisible and fostering a consensus that the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a universally supported win-win scenario. A total of 2,895 articles published between 2013-20 in three English newspapers-The News, Dawn, and The Nation-were analyzed. Initially, a qualitative content analysis was conducted to examine the framing of CPEC. Subsequently, critical discourse analysis was employed to scrutinize hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses as well as the actors and institutions involved in discourse creation and the processes of co-opting dissent.
