Codebook and Dataset Russian Geonarratives and Arab Media (RUGAME)
Eckart Woertz / Dima Abu Alkheir
Codebook and Dataset Russian Geonarratives and Arab Media (RUGAME)
Dataset | Harvard Dataverse
Description
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.
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 perceptions and space framing assumptions of Russian geopolitical imaginaries in the Arab world and how history is mobilized to support them.
