Otruba, A. (2022) No (Wo)man’s Land: Risking Detention Along the South Ossetian Administrative Boundary Line. In Diener, A.C. & Hagen, J. (Eds.), Invisible Borders in Very BorderedWorld: Geographies of Power, Mobility, and Belonging. New York, NY: Routledge.
This chapter appears in the Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen’s forthcoming edited volume, Invisible Borders in Very Bordered World: Geographies of Power, Mobility, and Belonging. This chapter examines the arbitrary detention of Georgian villagers living adjacent to the Georgian-South Ossetian Administrative Boundary Line. Intimate and emotional stories of border transgression are used to explore, not just what the borderization by the Russian FSB is, but how it comes to work. I argue that arbitrary detention transforms bodies into agents of territoriality and materializations of a shifting border regime. Representing striking trends in border securitization globally, I use arbitrary detentions to explore how the exercise of state power becomes malleable and movable as it is tethered to the body, rather than exercised solely through fixed, territorial markers. Moreover, by examining the dynamics of gendered relations of this embodied border, I’m able to show how border violence shapes emerging forms of traumatic masculinity. The chapter works to show how men’s stories and performances of risking, confronting, and evading arbitrary detention reveal a gendered geopolitical violence as much as mundane resistance to the emasculating effects of the cartographic anxieties produced by the Russian enforced border regime.
Otruba, A. (2019). The violent geography of borderization. [Doctoral dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey]. School of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-jx20-8f46
Borderland communities unequally and disproportionately suffer at the altar of geopolitics. Rather than the periphery, borderlands are the epicenter of territorial conflict and contests over sovereignty. This is evident in the Republic of Georgia after the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, where the Federal Security Service (FSB) of the Russian Federation began incrementally and unilaterally demarcating sections of the boundary line to the disputed and unrecognized territory of South Ossetia. This dissertation uses a feminist geopolitics approach to critically examine the violent geography of this borderization process. In addition to performing de facto sovereignty, borderization is theorized as a biopolitical tool of leverage. Qualitative mixed methods and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in a series of “conflict-affected villages” adjacent to the South Ossetian Administrative Boundary Line reveal how the uncertainties of the elastic border impacts the in/security of rural populations, whose pasturelands, homes, and social worlds are now bifurcated by the hardening of this dividing line. Two in-depth empirical chapters illustrate the embodied and emotional experiences of border violence. The first chapter shows how borderization transforms borderland villages into a "neitherland," which is a type of zone of abandonment. Through an emphasis on gendered mobilities, the second chapter demonstrates how ambiguously demarcated sections of the boundary imperil men vis-à-vis women, putting them at risk of arbitrary detention by the Russian-backed security regime. Attention to the issue of restricted freedom of movement and how men confront the border regime exposes an emerging form of traumatic masculinity, reinforcing an understanding of border violence as a gendered phenomenon.