Russian Geonarratives and Arab Media: Multipolarity, Eurasianism and Constructed ‘non-Wests’

The global order is in flux towards multipolarity, a process that is accompanied by an increasingly diverse narration of geopolitical imaginaries. Russia and the Arab world are key regions of contestation in that process with a long mutual history of entanglements. This article uses the concept of geonarratives and a dataset of nearly 3000 newspaper articles from Egypt, the Gulf countries, Iraq and Lebanon to analyse the space framing assumptions that are at play, how history is mobilized to support them and how they are accompanied by space making processes such as infrastructure building. Special attention is paid to the role of Arab agency in the perceptions of Russian geonarratives such as multipolarity and Eurasianism. Here, national reference points dominate, while previously influential regional geonarratives like pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism are now of diminished importance. The ideological fringe of Mashriqism, however, seeks to develop a distinct regional geographic identity of Greater Syria and Iraq and align itself with Russian geonarratives.