Codebook and Dataset Russian Geonarratives and Arab Media (RUGAME)

This codebook serves as a guide to how the dataset Russian Geonarratives and Arab Media (RUGAME) Dataset was developed and interpreted. The dataset contains 2.890 coded articles from a diverse collection of Arab media. It examines how Russian geonarratives such as multipolarity and Eurasianism are perceived in the Arab world, in particular their space-framing assumptions and the space-making processes that accompany them such as infrastructure-building. It also captures how these narratives intersect with local geonarratives that speak to Arab agency, ranging from supra-national geonarratives such as Pan-Arabism and Pan-Islamism to regional ones such as Greater Syria and Mashriqism and reference points at the level of the nation-state. The dataset is based on a content analysis of 2,890 Arabic-language media items, including articles, reports, news items, and opinion pieces published between 2000 and 2024. The selection covers a broad range of ideological orientations and countries in the Arab World. The dataset was used in the analysis of the following article: Woertz, Eckart, Falah Mubarak Bardan, and Dima Abu Alkheir. 2026. "Russian Geonarratives and Arab Media: Multipolarity, Eurasianism and Constructed ‘non-Wests’." British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies doi: 10.1080/13530194.2026.2632193.