In her timely and thoughtful book Hinterlands, Hannah Lucinda Smith uses the term, somewhat poetically, to mean contested places on the margins of modern states—and critically, former empires—where international attention has traditionally been sparse ... Her hinterlands are a series of specific places 'that have largely slipped under the news agenda and yet are central to the main story' ... This observation informs her compelling geopolitical picaresque through a collection of disputed and disordered territories across Europe and Asia.
An engaging cross between Dom Joly’s The Dark Tourist and Tom Parfitt’s High Caucasus ... Smith makes a powerful case for western policymakers to pay more attention to what is happening in these half-forgotten frontiers. But the reader is in good hands here too. Having reported for years on Turkey and the wider region, including Syria and the former Soviet Union, Smith knows her way round the bazaars and revels in the journalist’s art of telling good stories paired with incisive analysis.
A foreign correspondent examines the small-scale conflicts that threaten to heat up to major conflagrations ... Of broad interest to students of geopolitics—and, sadly, warfighters as well.
Fault lines are stirring between Turkey, Russia, and Europe according to this meandering geopolitical tour d’horizon ... But the antagonisms Smith examines don’t convincingly add up to harbingers of a new cold war, as she styles them—the places she visits feel palpably overlooked and neglected more so than settings for the hashing out of a new world order. Still, it’s a colorful ramble through the modern world’s borderlands.
