This study uses food as a lens through which to empirically and theoretically problematize the concept of security. Food – its supply, provision, and access – is situated at the center of several interconnected crises, from environmental and climatic upheaval to growing geopolitical turbulence and great power competition. Over the past decade, in connection with these urgent international problems, food has increasingly also been articulated as a matter of security. However, as this study demonstrates, food as security – or food security – does not yet represent a common conceptual or ontological foundation upon which coordinated, concerted, and global action can take place. Rather, as with the concept of “security” more broadly, food security remains polysemic and contested, and – as this study posits – holds no essential meaning besides that which is attributed to it in specific settings, by and for someone. Indeed, contemporary articulations of food security range from classical geopolitical notions of food as part of strategic, zero-sum advantage and state power, to food as a part of a positive-sum, cooperative notion addressing hunger universally for individuals. Rather than taking either interpretation for granted, this study instead problematizes both, specifically as they feature in the policy spaces of the Russian Federation and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). To do so, the study empirically traces how state-centered and human-centered accounts of food as security were institutionalized in these respective policy settings. Following how these contingent understandings of food security came to be so understood, however, the study serves to challenge fixed notions and theorizations of security more broadly. It forefronts the role that politics plays in the story of what security means and for whom it is intended. And it suggests that food security is both not only reflective but also (re-)productive of different ways of conducting international politics more generally.

Chinese actors have been actively engaged in agriculture in the Russian Far East since border liberalisation, from agriculture labourers, independent farmers with small- and medium-sized plots, to capital-rich agribusinesses that cultivate farmland on a much larger scale. With the use of wage labour and other capitalised production inputs, the occurrence of economic differentiation among producers and strong profit-seeking drivers, this stands in contrast to the situation within China itself – where institutional and structural constraints still limit the development of full-blown capitalist agriculture. This article presents the first case study of this phenomenon, in comparative perspective.

This article concerns the Soviet military's use of soldiers of Afghan ethnicities (Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen, and others) during its war in Afghanistan, both as spetsnazand more generally in the 40th army. Special Forces Detachment 154 and Special Forces Detachment 177, the first and second ‘Muslim Battalions,’ would play important roles not only during the palace takeover in December 1979 but also during the 1983 cease-fire in Panjshir. This article challenges earlier views that Soviet Muslims and Central Asians were unreliable soldiers who colluded with mujahedin, and points to a more balanced perspective of their role in Afghanistan.