Afterword to “The New War Frontiers and the End of Postsocialism”

Extract

Frontiers are locations of geopolitical assertion, reification, definition, and experiment, whether physical or symbolic, spatial or temporal. The papers for this special Slavic Review Forum examine important linked and parallel frontier-forming practices. These practices span the postsocialist space yet also, as several authors argue, negate that chronotopic and sociopolitical identifier. Frontier-reformulation practices include ideological constructions of emergent, yet familiar, enemies, new and refurbished commemorative rites and installations, mediated threat prediction, and discourses about undeclared wars that seem to promise to eventuate into future declared or at least named wars. As Neringa Klumbytė tells us in her introduction to this Forum, these practices both point to and produce “eventfulness.”