Hinterlands

A Pulitzer grantee’s timely work of reportage from the borderlands of Europe, Russia, and Turkey, where brewing conflicts mark a significant fault line in shifting geopolitics.

Hannah Lucinda Smith, a Pulitzer grantee and acclaimed foreign correspondent, has devoted well over a decade to intrepid, on-the-ground reporting where few dare travel: the small, often disputed territories at the edges of Europe and Russia. There, Smith finds, the influence of Vladimir Putin and his favored strongmen—along with Turkish president and regional lynchpin Recep Tayyip Erdogan—fan territorial disputes and destabilize already fragile democracies.

Hinterlands offers a rare glimpse into the ghost towns of Syria and Nagorno-Karabakh, the cryptocurrency farms of Transnistria, the brittle border communities of Bosnia and its Republika Srpska, and the enclaves of Northern Cyprus that Russian oligarchs call home. In rarely seen places in Crimea and the Caucasus, frontiers have shifted and new countries have been made. Informed by her encounters with politicians, combatants, and the ordinary people caught in the crosshairs, Smith paints a vivid portrait of the places where geopolitical alliances are forged and broken, where the violent ambitions of dictators are most keenly felt.

This indispensable account of events in the gray zones of Eurasia gives vital context to our rapidly changing world and sounds a clear-eyed, urgent warning: We ignore the hinterlands at our own peril. What happens inside them has the power to redraw the fault lines of a new Cold War and shape the future of the West.