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  • Political Practices and Tools of Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Space on the Case of Toponyms and Their Evolution

Political Practices and Tools of Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Space on the Case of Toponyms and Their Evolution

Student: Smekalin Ivan

Supervisor: Anastasia Poretskova

Faculty: Faculty of Social Sciences

Educational Programme: Political Science (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2021

The peculiarity of nation-building in the context of post-Soviet states is that a significant part of them did not have statehood in the modern and Western European sense before they were designated as part of the Soviet Union. The essential problem of this work is the ambiguity of the role and features of national construction strategies in relation to the Soviet heritage through the practice of changing and evolving toponyms in the post-Soviet space. Based on the theoretical framework of the segment-state institutions' identity hegemony by Philipp Roeder, it is possible to state research expectations that cultural hegemony within segment-state institutions in one way or another served as the basis for building national identity after independence. The chosen theoretical and conceptual approach to the consideration of specific practices involves solving the complexity in the conceptualization of the practices of nation-building. The concepts of nation-building, the hegemony of identity and the sense of belonging are combined within the framework of critical toponymy as part of socio-cultural geography. According to this approach, the place where these concepts meet is toponymy: the naming of places is inextricably linked to nation-building. The political role of a toponym is to link a symbol and a space. In this paper, renaming is considered from two angles: as a text and as an arena of antagonism. It is worth noting that the textual dimension was studied by the methods of corpus linguistics, and the antagonistic aspect of renaming was studied by the method of discourse analysis by E. Laclau and Ch. Mouffe, which focuses on the study of politics as antagonism. To solve the research tasks, a combination of two methods will be utilized within the framework of the methodological approach of corpus discourse analysis: qualitative understanding of the discourse and its quantitative analysis. As part of the application of computational linguistics methods, the recognized roots from the former and current names of renamed toponyms were offered as input to the semantic model. Toponyms are assigned a list of values of their proximity to the most common root words before and after renaming. Based on this, clusters are formed and interpreted. The research question of the discursive part is "How is the change of names of localities articulated in the public discourse?". When considering the specific practice of articulating the meaning of renaming localities, the nodal points and the relation of the other signs to them are recognized. On the basis of the disputed signs, conclusions are derived about the discursive space and the subject of the struggle when articulating the meaning of toponymic names. For the selection of cases, the principle of binary contrast comparison was used. The toponymic policies of Belarus and Ukraine differ in the formal configuration of segmental institutions of identity hegemony during secession: in the first case, segmental institutions were managed to support the identity of the common state, and in the second case, an attempt was made to build an alternative national project. The novelty of the obtained empirical results lies in the fact that thanks to the chosen method of corpus discourse analysis, the entire corpus of renamed toponyms on the territory of the case countries was considered for the first time, which allowed us to notice the least reflexive feature of these renames. Strategies of nation-building in relation to the Soviet heritage in the post-Soviet space can be described in terms of substitution and appropriation, which is confirmed not only by quantitative data of semantic analysis but also by the results of discourse analysis, during which discourses were identified indicating the loss of national historical heritage when the Soviet names were abandoned.

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