Merje Kuus
Biographic Data
| ID | 254844 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Merje Kuus |
| GIVEN NAMES | Merje |
| FAMILY NAME | Kuus |
| SIGNATURE | KUUS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3506-8131 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 621 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Arctic circles: Transprofessional networking and international governance
Arctic-focused networking events are gaining prominence as sites of transnational and transprofessional governance. Central among such events is the Arctic Circle Assembly, an annual conference that takes place in Reykjavik in October. This paper uses Arctic conferences in general and the Arctic Circle Assembly in particular to examine transnational and transprofessional knowledge-creation, a process that requires regular interaction across natio…
Aesthetics and perception in geographical writing: The Case of Wine
To cultivate emotionally engaged and embodied geographical research, we, as human geographers, need to engage more closely with sensory perception and aesthetics in geographical writing. Put simply, we need to write (more) about beauty and pleasure. This commentary uses wine as a touchpoint to explore how such writing can be done. Drawing on the work on geographical writing, the interdisciplinary study of food and wine, and food and wine writing,…
What makes a wine region worth visiting: Place and beauty in Okanagan Valley, British Columbia
This article explores the potential of Okanagan Valley as a place of distinctive wines and the tourism experiences that match these wines. By “distinctive” I mean wines with a sense of place woven into their production and marketing—wines that are called “terroir‐driven” in the wine world. My focus is not on wine production, but on place‐making and regional planning. The article is informed by geographical and sociological work on wine, but it ac…
Interstitial expertise and international governance: Cultivating diplomatic practitioners in Europe
This paper investigates boundary spaces and agents in one social field: the socialization of diplomatic and European Union (EU) professionals in Europe. Theoretically, I combine the geographical work on boundary practices in diplomacy with the Bourdieusian scholarship on transnational fields in sociology and international relations. Empirically, I examine the institutional settings in which the professionals who move in EU diplomacy are trained a…
Between an archipelago and an ice floe: The know-where of Arctic governance expertise
This paper examines the production of Arctic governance expertise, understood here as the specialised knowledge through which international cooperation is regulated in the region. Instead of presuming that such expertise is created primarily in the capitals of Arctic states, I ask a more open-ended question: where specifically does that process take place? I argue that Arctic governance expertise increasingly operates in a transnational and netwo…
The in-person of fieldwork: On effectiveness, efficiency, and ethics
Bureaucratic Sociability, or the Missing Eighty Percent of Effectiveness: The Case of Diplomacy
This paper examines and theorises sociability–‘the play-form of association’–in diplomatic settings. I highlight the workings of sociable interaction in diplomacy and I explain how we can better discern its broader role in bureaucratic processes. Empirically, I use virtual diplomacy during the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate the difference that in-person sociability makes in diplomatic practice. The second half of the paper title references a com…
Thinking with Diplomacy: Within and Beyond Practice Theory
Following the considerable interest in practice theory, this Collective Discussion interrogates what it means to practice and, ultimately, to think with diplomacy. In asking how empirical, methodological, and axiological disagreements over what constitutes diplomatic practice can be productively employed to develop or revise practice theory, the Discussion engages the historically and culturally contingent practices of diplomacy. In doing so, it …
Europe’s future depends on perspective not policy
Before we can fruitfully discuss what Europe ought to do about its various policy dilemmas, we need to re-examine the lens through which we view these dilemmas. I will highlight two problems with the habitual lens on Europe’s future: firstly, it’s unrealistic emphasis on clarity and coherence and, secondly, its state-centrism and state-envy. I explore the ways in which we can reverse the lens to examine familiar problems from unfamiliar angles
Regulatory power and region-making in the Arctic: China and the European Union
This commentary foregrounds the import of regulatory power in region-making practices in the Arctic. I note the increasing interest in Arctic governance from China in the context of its Belt and Road Initiative and from the European Union in the context of its overall political agenda. I discuss what regulatory power means, why it matters, and what greater attention to it would add to our understanding of Arctic regionalism. My goal is to highlig…
Professions and their expertise: Charting the spaces of ‘elite’ occupations
This paper argues for a sustained study of knowledge-intensive or liberal professions in geography. I review existing work in political geography and related fields to identify a gap in the study of knowledge-intensive professions, especially those that are popularly associated with elites. I draw from sociology, anthropology, and international relations to explain why we need to better understand such professions. By the geographical study of pr…
Political geography III: Bounding the International
This report focuses on the imaginaries and practices that demarcate space at the international and supranational scale. I will first review political geographic scholarship on region-making and regionalism, using the studies of Europe and the Belt and Road Initiative as examples, and I will then highlight some central themes in the current research on international borders. The report highlights the flexibility of bounding practices and the polym…
Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery
Historians often assume a one-directional transmission of knowledge and ideas, leading to the establishment of spatial hierarchies defined as centres and peripheries. In recent decades, transnational and global history have contributed to a more inclusive understanding of intellectual and cultural exchanges that profoundly challenged the ways in which we draw our mental maps. \n \nCovering the early modern and modern periods, Re-Mapping Centre an…
The terroir of bureaucratic practice: Everyday life and scholarly method in the study of policy
This article seeks to connect political geographic scholarship on institutions and policy more firmly to the experience of everyday life. Empirically, I foreground the ambiguous and indeterminate character of institutional decision-making and I underscore the need to closely consider the sensory texture of place and milieu in our analyses of it. My examples come from the study of diplomatic practice in Brussels, the capital of the European Union.…
Political geography II: Institutions
Modern power is bureaucratized power, institutionalized formally through governmental and non-governmental structures and informally through unwritten social conventions. This report reviews recent political geographic work on the institutional arrangements that enable and constrain all political practice. Institutions here refer to organizations as well as looser semi-institutionalized patterns in public and private life. The report will first e…
Transnational institutional fields: Positionality and generalization in the study of diplomacy
Diplomacy and the Other – and Wagner
Political geography I: Agency
This report focuses on human agency – the capacity to act in a given context – as it is studied and reflected upon in political geographic research. I first discuss the investigations of agency in the wide-ranging work on political subjectivity and identity formation. The report then turns to the efforts to trace ideas and things in political processes. I showcase the attention to transnational networks and fields as well as the work inspired by …
Interventions on Europe's political futures
Routledge Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics
Political economies of transnational fields: Harmonization and differentiation in European diplomacy
Political economies of transnational fields: harmonization and differentiation in European diplomacy. Territory, Politics, Governance. Focusing on Europe, this paper analyses diplomacy as an uneven transnational field. The field is uneven not only along the predictable lines of big and small states, but also along the lines of wealth and tradition that are customarily overlooked in diplomatic studies. The political economy of European diplomacy c…
Regional Institutions
To Understand the Place”: Geographical Knowledge and Diplomatic Practice
Diplomats produce a great deal of geographical knowledge: By reporting on distant places to their governments, they create particular understandings of political space. Yet these professionals rarely link their work to geography: What a geographer might call a geographical sensibility is labeled cultural knowledge by a diplomat. This article clarifies the relationship between geographical knowledge and diplomatic practice. Empirically, it draws f…
Diplomacy and audit: Technologies of knowledge in Europe
Symbolic power in diplomatic practice: Matters of style in Brussels
This paper investigates the workings of symbolic power in diplomatic practice. At the level of empirical observation, it focuses on the intangible and incalculable ‘feel for the game’ that distinguishes a well-informed and relaxed insider from an ill-informed and ill-at-ease outsider in European Union (EU) diplomatic circles in Brussels. By highlighting the play of social resources, such as reputation, presence, poise, and composure in these circ…
Europe's eastern expansion and the reinscription of otherness in East-Central Europe
This article examines how EU and NATO enlargement is framed by the dichotomy of Europe versus Eastern Europe, and how the enlargement process simultaneously transforms that dichotomy. I argue that the double enlargement is underpinned by a broadly orientalist discourse that assumes essential difference between Europe and Eastern Europe and frames difference from Western Europe as a distance from and a lack of Europeanness. I suggest that in order…
Symbolic power in diplomatic practice: Matters of style in Brussels
This paper investigates the workings of symbolic power in diplomatic practice. At the level of empirical observation, it focuses on the intangible and incalculable ‘feel for the game’ that distinguishes a well-informed and relaxed insider from an ill-informed and ill-at-ease outsider in European Union (EU) diplomatic circles in Brussels. By highlighting the play of social resources, such as reputation, presence, poise, and composure in these circ…
Foreign Policy and Ethnography: A Sceptical Intervention
This article makes a methodological argument about ‘studying up’ in foreign policy bureaucracies. Although recent years have witnessed a growing interest in ethnography across the social sciences, including the study of foreign policy and diplomacy, theoretical reflections on the methodology as such greatly outnumber those that actually attempt ethnographic accounts of foreign policy institutions. This imbalance results in large part from the dif…
Political geography I: Agency
This report focuses on human agency – the capacity to act in a given context – as it is studied and reflected upon in political geographic research. I first discuss the investigations of agency in the wide-ranging work on political subjectivity and identity formation. The report then turns to the efforts to trace ideas and things in political processes. I showcase the attention to transnational networks and fields as well as the work inspired by …
European Integration in Identity Narratives in Estonia: A Quest for Security
The article situates the Estonian discourse of national identity in the country's pursuits of EU and NATO membership. It first outlines the assumptions, concepts, and rhetorical devices through which the notion of national identity is constructed in discussions of international integration, and then highlights the policy ramifications of the identity discourse. The article concentrates on the three closely linked concepts - civilizational conflic…
Transnational bureaucracies: How do we know what they know
This paper assesses geographic and especially political geographic work on transnational bureaucratic knowledge production. The term ‘transnational’ signals policy processes that blend national and extranational dynamics in institutional settings that transcend the governmental structures of states. The focus is on the international arena rather than national policy-making. The paper foregrounds the growing attention to bureaucratic processes in …
Thinking with Diplomacy: Within and Beyond Practice Theory
Following the considerable interest in practice theory, this Collective Discussion interrogates what it means to practice and, ultimately, to think with diplomacy. In asking how empirical, methodological, and axiological disagreements over what constitutes diplomatic practice can be productively employed to develop or revise practice theory, the Discussion engages the historically and culturally contingent practices of diplomacy. In doing so, it …
To Understand the Place”: Geographical Knowledge and Diplomatic Practice
Diplomats produce a great deal of geographical knowledge: By reporting on distant places to their governments, they create particular understandings of political space. Yet these professionals rarely link their work to geography: What a geographer might call a geographical sensibility is labeled cultural knowledge by a diplomat. This article clarifies the relationship between geographical knowledge and diplomatic practice. Empirically, it draws f…
Interventions in banal neoimperialism
Ubiquitous identities and elusive subjects: Puzzles from Central Europe
This paper investigates the logic of explanation according to which identity is an attribute or a feature of subjects like states and nations. Drawing examples from the scholarship on identity in Central Europe, especially Estonia, it argues that the story by which identity is customarily told is circular, presupposing the very subject for which it seeks to give an account. The puzzle, then, is how to overcome the perspective of a subject already…
Cosmopolitan Militarism? Spaces of Nato Expansion
This paper investigates the normalization of military institutions through narratives of global cooperation-a phenomenon that I call cosmopolitan militarism. Empirically, I analyze how the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) uses globalist spatial imaginaries to frame military approaches to political problems as enlightened and good (as well as necessary). In particular, I examine how this framing is effected by nonstate actors in the civil…
Policy and Geopolitics: Bounding Europe in EUrope
This article analyzes geopolitics as a bureaucratic practice conducted by career policy professionals. Empirically, I investigate how the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) continuously produces and transforms the geopolitical category of “Europe” inside the European Union's (EU) policymaking bureaucracy—or EUrope as it is called colloquially. Drawing in part from forty-six interviews with thirty-five policy professionals, the article elucidates…
Bureaucratic Sociability, or the Missing Eighty Percent of Effectiveness: The Case of Diplomacy
This paper examines and theorises sociability–‘the play-form of association’–in diplomatic settings. I highlight the workings of sociable interaction in diplomacy and I explain how we can better discern its broader role in bureaucratic processes. Empirically, I use virtual diplomacy during the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate the difference that in-person sociability makes in diplomatic practice. The second half of the paper title references a com…
For Slow Research
This essay addresses a relatively neglected practical aspect of critical policy studies: the pressure to produce many research outputs. That pressure emanates in part from the fast-paced policy world studied by the researcher, and in part (perhaps even more significantly) from the university environment of the researcher herself. The essay highlights how the tendency towards output-driven or fast research operates and what analytical traps it eng…
Sovereignty for security: The discourse of sovereignty in Estonia
Bureaucracy and place: Expertise in the European Quarter
Bureaucratic structures and procedures are an integral part of the production of political space today. Analyses of geopolitical practices must therefore unpack the bureaucratic context in which these practices unfold on a daily basis. This is particularly important if we wish to understand transnational processes that operate at scales and in contexts other than the familiar contours of the nation‐state. In this article, I focus on one bureaucra…
Švejkian Geopolitics: Subversive Obedience in Central Europe
This article uses the character of Josef Švejk from the popular Czech novel The Good Soldier Švejk and his Fortunes in the World War to illuminate the subversive effects of irony and self-deprecating humour on dominant geopolitical narratives. Empirically, my examples focus on the coverage of NATO invitation in major Estonian newspapers in 2002. Theoretically, these examples highlight the subtlety of resistance and the central role of irony in it…
Intellectuals and geopolitics: The ‘cultural politicians’ of Central Europe
Those Goody-Goody Estonians: Toward Rethinking Security in the European Union Candidate States
The discursive construction of security in the European Union (EU) candidate states has received little attention. One effect of this gap is to discreetly frame EU applicants as learners or adopters of Western concepts of security. This overlooks the key role of local intellectuals of statecraft in the making of security both in the candidate states and in the Western institutions with which these states integrate. Based on the case of Estonia, t…
Toward Cooperative Security? International Integration and the Construction of Security in Estonia
This article investigates how the notion of security is used in Estonia both to legitimise and delegitimise international integration. It outlines the assumptions, claims and modes of analysis that underpin security narratives, specifying what are constructed as threats to Estonia and what are framed as appropriate countermeasures to these threats. The article scrutinises in particular whether this discourse is undergoing a transformation from ex…
Interventions on Europe's political futures
Whose regional expertise? Political geographies of knowledge in the European Union
This article examines the production of geographical expertise inside the European Union (EU) bureaucracy in Brussels. My question is not what EU policy professionals know, but how they deploy specific knowledge claims as expertise. Drawing from 62 interviews with 42 policy professionals, mostly in Brussels, I focus empirically on one facet of one policy: the eastern direction of the European Neighbourhood Policy and the efforts of the ‘new’ or p…
Political geography II: Institutions
Modern power is bureaucratized power, institutionalized formally through governmental and non-governmental structures and informally through unwritten social conventions. This report reviews recent political geographic work on the institutional arrangements that enable and constrain all political practice. Institutions here refer to organizations as well as looser semi-institutionalized patterns in public and private life. The report will first e…
Professionals of Geopolitics: Agency in International Politics
This article highlights the key role of intellectuals of statecraft - the politicians, academics, consultants, and pundits who regularly participate in and comment on the practice of international affairs - in the practice of geopolitics. These professionals command the institutional and cultural resources required to project particular geopolitical arguments as informed and authoritative. We, therefore, need to carefully unpack the ways in which…
Professions and their expertise: Charting the spaces of ‘elite’ occupations
This paper argues for a sustained study of knowledge-intensive or liberal professions in geography. I review existing work in political geography and related fields to identify a gap in the study of knowledge-intensive professions, especially those that are popularly associated with elites. I draw from sociology, anthropology, and international relations to explain why we need to better understand such professions. By the geographical study of pr…
Toward Cooperative Security? International Integration and the Construction of Security in Estonia
This article investigates how the notion of security is used in Estonia both to legitimise and delegitimise international integration. It outlines the assumptions, claims and modes of analysis that underpin security narratives, specifying what are constructed as threats to Estonia and what are framed as appropriate countermeasures to these threats. The article scrutinises in particular whether this discourse is undergoing a transformation from ex…
Sovereignty for security: The discourse of sovereignty in Estonia
European Integration in Identity Narratives in Estonia: A Quest for Security
The article situates the Estonian discourse of national identity in the country's pursuits of EU and NATO membership. It first outlines the assumptions, concepts, and rhetorical devices through which the notion of national identity is constructed in discussions of international integration, and then highlights the policy ramifications of the identity discourse. The article concentrates on the three closely linked concepts - civilizational conflic…
The Baltic transformed: Complexity theory and European security
Europe's eastern expansion and the reinscription of otherness in East-Central Europe
This article examines how EU and NATO enlargement is framed by the dichotomy of Europe versus Eastern Europe, and how the enlargement process simultaneously transforms that dichotomy. I argue that the double enlargement is underpinned by a broadly orientalist discourse that assumes essential difference between Europe and Eastern Europe and frames difference from Western Europe as a distance from and a lack of Europeanness. I suggest that in order…
Those Goody-Goody Estonians: Toward Rethinking Security in the European Union Candidate States
The discursive construction of security in the European Union (EU) candidate states has received little attention. One effect of this gap is to discreetly frame EU applicants as learners or adopters of Western concepts of security. This overlooks the key role of local intellectuals of statecraft in the making of security both in the candidate states and in the Western institutions with which these states integrate. Based on the case of Estonia, t…
Multiple Europes: Boundaries and Margins in European Union Enlargement
Intellectuals and geopolitics: The ‘cultural politicians’ of Central Europe
Geopolitics Reframed: Security and Identity in Europe's Eastern Enlargement
This book traces the shifting meanings of security and geopolitics in Central European states that acceded into the EU or NATO in 2004. The author examines assumptions that shaped these debates and in
Something old, something new: Eastness in European Union enlargement
Love, Peace and Nato”: Imperial Subject‐Making in Central Europe
This paper uses NATO enlargement to examine the processes through which political subjects are made. Starting from the observation that the world's most powerful military alliance is increasingly framed not in terms of military defence, but in terms of democracy, freedom, and “European values”, the paper analyzes how this process works, and with what effects. It shows how NATO is, on the one hand, being made so common‐sense as to be boring—below …
Ubiquitous identities and elusive subjects: Puzzles from Central Europe
This paper investigates the logic of explanation according to which identity is an attribute or a feature of subjects like states and nations. Drawing examples from the scholarship on identity in Central Europe, especially Estonia, it argues that the story by which identity is customarily told is circular, presupposing the very subject for which it seeks to give an account. The puzzle, then, is how to overcome the perspective of a subject already…
Theorizing the State Geographically: Sovereignty, Subjectivity, Territoriality
Švejkian Geopolitics: Subversive Obedience in Central Europe
This article uses the character of Josef Švejk from the popular Czech novel The Good Soldier Švejk and his Fortunes in the World War to illuminate the subversive effects of irony and self-deprecating humour on dominant geopolitical narratives. Empirically, my examples focus on the coverage of NATO invitation in major Estonian newspapers in 2002. Theoretically, these examples highlight the subtlety of resistance and the central role of irony in it…
Interventions in banal neoimperialism
Professionals of Geopolitics: Agency in International Politics
This article highlights the key role of intellectuals of statecraft - the politicians, academics, consultants, and pundits who regularly participate in and comment on the practice of international affairs - in the practice of geopolitics. These professionals command the institutional and cultural resources required to project particular geopolitical arguments as informed and authoritative. We, therefore, need to carefully unpack the ways in which…
Political geography and geopolitics
This essay discusses the key contributions of Canadian political geographers to the remarkable growth of the subfield in the past two decades. I focus on two burgeoning strands of work: first, the transformation of state power, and second, the current phase of war, militarization and surveillance globally. My goal is not to review the field of political geography. Rather, I use the two themes to foreground prominent strands of recent work and del…
Cosmopolitan Militarism? Spaces of Nato Expansion
This paper investigates the normalization of military institutions through narratives of global cooperation-a phenomenon that I call cosmopolitan militarism. Empirically, I analyze how the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) uses globalist spatial imaginaries to frame military approaches to political problems as enlightened and good (as well as necessary). In particular, I examine how this framing is effected by nonstate actors in the civil…
EUrope and the Baroque
Whose regional expertise? Political geographies of knowledge in the European Union
This article examines the production of geographical expertise inside the European Union (EU) bureaucracy in Brussels. My question is not what EU policy professionals know, but how they deploy specific knowledge claims as expertise. Drawing from 62 interviews with 42 policy professionals, mostly in Brussels, I focus empirically on one facet of one policy: the eastern direction of the European Neighbourhood Policy and the efforts of the ‘new’ or p…
Policy and Geopolitics: Bounding Europe in EUrope
This article analyzes geopolitics as a bureaucratic practice conducted by career policy professionals. Empirically, I investigate how the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) continuously produces and transforms the geopolitical category of “Europe” inside the European Union's (EU) policymaking bureaucracy—or EUrope as it is called colloquially. Drawing in part from forty-six interviews with thirty-five policy professionals, the article elucidates…
Bureaucracy and place: Expertise in the European Quarter
Bureaucratic structures and procedures are an integral part of the production of political space today. Analyses of geopolitical practices must therefore unpack the bureaucratic context in which these practices unfold on a daily basis. This is particularly important if we wish to understand transnational processes that operate at scales and in contexts other than the familiar contours of the nation‐state. In this article, I focus on one bureaucra…
Foreign Policy and Ethnography: A Sceptical Intervention
This article makes a methodological argument about ‘studying up’ in foreign policy bureaucracies. Although recent years have witnessed a growing interest in ethnography across the social sciences, including the study of foreign policy and diplomacy, theoretical reflections on the methodology as such greatly outnumber those that actually attempt ethnographic accounts of foreign policy institutions. This imbalance results in large part from the dif…
Places of lower rank: Margins in conversations
Transnational bureaucracies: How do we know what they know
This paper assesses geographic and especially political geographic work on transnational bureaucratic knowledge production. The term ‘transnational’ signals policy processes that blend national and extranational dynamics in institutional settings that transcend the governmental structures of states. The focus is on the international arena rather than national policy-making. The paper foregrounds the growing attention to bureaucratic processes in …
Political science (45 works) · Law (42 works) · Sociology (41 works) · Politics (38 works) · Political economy (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Economics (17 works) · European union (16 works) · European Union Policy and Governance (14 works) · Geography (14 works)