Круглый стол «Возможна ли «колонизация» пространства?»

The era of mobility erases territorial identity, but this does notdiminish the relevance of its study, even if only as a historicalphenomenon. For “regions of late development”, such as the FarEast, identity is associated with the concepts of colonization /development, and, moreover, inherent in the name of the region.Our team has already addressed the problem of correlating theconcepts of “colonization” and “development”; this time wedecided to focus on the approach of Alexander Etkind, whopublished another book in the outgoing year. The purpose of ourmeeting was to discuss the system of Alexander Etkind’s views onthe essence of coloniality, to analyze one of the central conceptsused by Etkind in many studies, “internal colonization”, and toassess the limits of this concept’s applicability. Main issues fordiscussion: 1) in “The Nature of Evil: Raw Materials and theState” Etkind writes about natural resources as raw materialsfor production; are the author's categories suitable for analyzingspace as a resource for development, space as such, withouttaking into account the raw materials available there? Can theFar East, for example, be interpreted as a “presence colony”? 2)the logic of the concept of internal colonization is based on theidea of exoticization of the outskirts by the center, commonersby the ruling class, society by the state; in this case, is it possibleto interpret the toponyms “Russian Far East” and “PacificRussia” used today as two images of the territory – traditionalcolonial (exoticizing and dividing) and modern non-colonial(normalizing and integrating)?