Torched Earth: Dimensions of extraterritorial nationalism in the Chinese and Russian Olympic torch relays

•The Beijing 2008 and Sochi 2014 Olympic relays were state-orchestrated nationalist displays.•The relays demonstrate that the state can perform and mobilize nationalism outside its borders.•The relays helped create a sense of extraterritorial nationalism in China and Russia.•Expansion of the two nations’ geo-bodies marshaled narratives of civilizational nationalism.•Just as the state is deterritorializing, the nation is, too.

Spanning tens of thousands of kilometers around the world, the torch relays for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics and the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics were the two longest in history and arguably some of the most provocative. As spectacles designed by committees with close affiliations to the state in both China and Russia, the relays also constituted state-orchestrated extraterritorial displays of nationalism. This paper uses these events as case studies to theorize the role of spaces beyond a country’s borders in state performances and mobilization of nationalism. I first sketch out the evolving relationships between the state, space, and nationalism in Russia and China while paying close attention to how longstanding narratives of universal and civilizational nationalism in each country are unfolding in a globalizing, deterritorializing world. Then, I examine how the international legs of the Olympic torch relays provided opportunities for the Chinese and Russian states to expand the national geo-body significantly outside state borders in a variety of dimensions. The Beijing relay passed through cities important for the Chinese diaspora and trade routes while the Sochi relay traveled to the global commons of the North Pole and outer space. Both of these state displays of nationalism supported the extraterritorial expansion of a nation’s geo-body and socio-spatial consciousness, suggesting the creation of a more spatially unbounded national identity not necessarily linked to the contained territory over which the state exercises sovereignty.

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