‘It is Krajina all over again’: geopolitics of spite and geographical analogy in a Serbian newspaper audience

Abstract

This paper addresses the negotiation of geopolitical knowledge by internet audiences in the comment section of the website of the Serbian newspaper Politika. It maps changes in the commenters’ attitudes towards Russia’s declarative role as the international protector of Serbia’s territorial sovereignty through an examination of online comments on the Russo-Georgian war in 2008 and Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. Starting with Serbia’s international humiliation during the Yugoslav wars, exemplified by the exodus from the Republic of Serbian Krajina in 1995 and the Kosovo crisis of 1999, it analyses the strategies that users deploy to draw geographical analogies between distant and local places and across time. The example of this Serbian newspaper comment board is used to discuss the benefits of deeper engagement with online comments in geopolitical narrative and argue for the value of treating geographical analogies as expressions of emotion. The sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD) is shown to be useful in popular geopolitical analysis, especially of the knowledge/emotion nexus. SKAD is used to propose a context-specific way of accessing emotions in geopolitical narratives, taking the case of what is traditionally regarded as a national character trait in Serbia–inat, or ‘spite, defiance’.