Postcolonialism, Multitude, and the Politics of Nature: On the Changing Geographies of the European North - Paperback

by Ari Aukusti Lehtinen (Author)

Postcolonialism, Multitude, and the Politics of Nature offers an overview of the latest developments of Nordic human geography and relates it to parallel Anglo-American and Continental European debates. The case studies focus on the Finnish-Russian Greenbelt, also known as the Fennoscandian Greenbelt, located at the long north-south border between the two countries. The Greenbelt is a geopolitical and socioenvironmental hybrid, or anomaly, that contains an array of cultural, economic, environmental, political, and epistemic interfaces. The drama and the dynamics of the border challenge the analytical and interpretative capabilities of human geography. Postcolonialism, Multitude, and the Politics of Nature describes in detail the lands and lives of the Greenbelt inhabitants who settled down in a multicultural meeting place of Finno-Ugric, Scandinavian, and Slavic cultures, as well as Orthodox and Lutheran faiths. The Greenbelt is also studied in relation to contemporary pressures of globalization, ranging from geopolitical reformulation of the relations between the European Union and Russia to transcontinental reorganizations in trade and environmental concerns.

Author Biography

Ari Aukusti Lehtinen is Professor of Geography at the University of Joensuu in eastern Finland. Lehtinen has specialized in Northern European issues and the Greenbelt communities since the 1980s. He is the author of Northern Natures (1991), The Fall of the Forest Villages: Ecological and Cultural Conflicts in the Russian Taiga (1993), editor of Politics of Forests (2003), and numerous scholarly articles on issues such as environmental justice and biopolitical empowerment.