Beyond Russophobia

The article offers a practice-based analysis of Finland’s relationships with Russia. It works on the basis of ideas that have been presented in conjunction with the so-called practice and pragmatist turns in international relations. After identifying three key schools of thought in previous research on Finnish–Russian relations – primordialist, instrumentalist and identity-based – the article moves on to give a practice turn inspired account of the ways in which the proximity of Russia was dealt with in Finland during the inter-war period. Combining insights from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Charles S. Peirce, it introduces a research design built with the help of such analytical tools as the doubt-belief model of social action, relational properties and fields. These tools are then applied on research materials that comprise Finnish parliamentary documents and political cartoons. The materials are argued to be particularly well suited for attempts to apply practice insights in actual research, as they simultaneously function as embodiments of meaningful patterns of social and political activity and actively correlate with the urgencies of the contexts in which they appear.