Suchergebnisse

During its 2008 intervention in Georgia, Russia justified its actions by appealing to its responsibility to protect compatriots, civilians and soldiers. At the international level, such justification was refuted on both legal and normative grounds. However, during the Crimean crisis of 2014, Russia yet again resorted to the same kind of rhetoric, even though the Crimean case provided even less grounds for making such justification convincing for the international audience. I argue that Russia's rhetorical choices, instead of being a mere smokescreen for the Kremlin's realpolitik, are symptomatic. They stem from the tensions in Russia's political identity. Out of three semantic clusters in Russia's responsibility discourse, only one – responsibility as moral duty – enjoyed overwhelming support among its main target audience (domestic population). I suggest that the continued references to its legal and international systemic responsibilities, puzzling for international audience, were epiphenomenal to Russia's successful appeals to its moral duties at home.

International politics is often imagined via a binary opposition between the oppressor and the oppressed. Attention to entrenched hierarchies of power is essential in the study of international politics. However, taking this division too rigidly can obfuscate the very mechanisms of power that must be understood in order to grasp these hierarchies. We identify one such mechanism in the practice of trickstery, particularly as practiced in the context of Russia's ambivalent and conflicted place in international society. Through the dynamics of trickstery, we show the workings of stigmatisation to be a plural phenomenon, giving rise to various normative challenges. The trickster is both conformist and deviant, hero and anti-hero – a "plural figure" both reflecting the rich cultural texture of international society and contesting its hierarchies. The trickster particularly unsettles the ideal liberal (global) public sphere through its simultaneous performance of emancipatory and anti-emancipatory logics. In this, trickstery produces normatively undecidable situations that exceed the analytical capacities of, for example, the strategic use of norms, norm contestation, and stigma management literatures. We find trickstery to be encapsulated in the contemporary international situation of Russia, while recognising that its practices are potentially available to other actors with similarly liminal status and cultural repertoires. We particularly analyse the trickster practice of 'overidentification' with norms, which apparently endorses but indirectly subverts the normative frameworks within which it is performed. Such overidentification is a form of satire, contemporaneously appropriated by state actors, which has indeterminate yet significant effects.

International politics is often imagined via a binary opposition between the oppressor and the oppressed. Attention to entrenched hierarchies of power is essential in the study of international politics. However, taking this division too rigidly can obfuscate the very mechanisms of power that must be understood in order to grasp these hierarchies. We identify one such mechanism in the practice of trickstery, particularly as practiced in the context of Russia's ambivalent and conflicted place in international society. Through the dynamics of trickstery, we show the workings of stigmatisation to be a plural phenomenon, giving rise to various normative challenges. The trickster is both conformist and deviant, hero and anti-hero – a "plural figure" both reflecting the rich cultural texture of international society and contesting its hierarchies. The trickster particularly unsettles the ideal liberal (global) public sphere through its simultaneous performance of emancipatory and anti-emancipatory logics. In this, trickstery produces normatively undecidable situations that exceed the analytical capacities of, for example, the strategic use of norms, norm contestation, and stigma management literatures. We find trickstery to be encapsulated in the contemporary international situation of Russia, while recognising that its practices are potentially available to other actors with similarly liminal status and cultural repertoires. We particularly analyse the trickster practice of 'overidentification' with norms, which apparently endorses but indirectly subverts the normative frameworks within which it is performed. Such overidentification is a form of satire, contemporaneously appropriated by state actors, which has indeterminate yet significant effects.

This article considers the significance of trolling for security processes through a contextual analysis of industrialized pro-Kremlin trolling in the Russian blogosphere. The publicity surrounding Russia's hacking activities in international politics conceals the significance of the domestic trolling culture in Russia and its role in the 'trolling turn' in Russia's foreign policy. We contextually identify the practice of 'neutrollization' – a type of localized desecuritization where the regime adopts trolling to prevent being cast as a societal security threat by civil society. Neutrollization relies on counterfeit internet activism, ostensibly originating from the citizenry, that produces political disengagement by breeding radical doubt in a manner that is non-securitizing. Rather than advocating a distinct political agenda, and in contrast to conventional understandings of the operations of propaganda, neutrollization precludes the very possibility of meaning, obviating the need to block the internet in an openly authoritarian manner. It operates by preventing perlocution – that is, the social consequences of the security speech act. This prevention is achieved through the breaking or disrupting of the context in which acts of securitization could possibly materialize, and is made possible by a condition of 'politics without telos' that is different from the varieties of depoliticization more familiar in Western societies.

Over the last two decades, it has become clear that Russia insists on its great power status, even at considerable cost. Chasing Greatness provides an interpretive explanation of the tacit rules that shape Russia's great power identity today. Anatoly Reshetnikov argues that this never-ending chase for greatness is a result of how Russia and its predecessors--including the USSR, Russian Empire, Muscovy, and Kievan Rus'--historically interacted with its neighbors to the east, the south, and particularly the west. By analyzing an extensive amount of original source material, including primary sources that have not been previously translated into English, he is able to reconstruct a millennial history of the Russian concepts that express political greatness. He also traces numerous encounters between Russia and the West, as well as Russia's troubled integration into the European society of states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to show how these concepts have affected Russia's interaction with international society. Despite its substantive historical depth, Chasing Greatness is not a book of history. Rather, it is a synthesizing social science work inspired by the continental tradition of the critical history of modernity. As such, the book is more about the present than about the past. Its main aim is to expose and explain the rich conceptual baggage behind Russia's unceasing great power rhetoric (domestic and international) and how this rhetoric drives the current international crises involving Russia

AbstractThe nationwide prominence of Russian oppositional artists has inspired a fair number of studies analyzing the political aspects of their creative output. We argue that the new generation of Russian musicians, whose art became popular in the end of 2010s, brings political engagement to a qualitatively new level. Following Jacques Rancière, we reject the assumption that critical art can bring about political mobilization by exposing social evils. Instead, we juxtapose politics and police, distinguishing between transformative moments of discursive confrontation and the mundane activity centered on distributing places and roles. In this article, we look at three popular Russian musical collectives – IC3PEAK, Shortparis, and Monetochka – whose art disrupts the police order in a novel and subversive manner. Some of their works became even more timely with the outbreak of Russia's large-scale aggression against Ukraine. We have performed multimodal discourse analysis of their audio and video clips, aimed at identifying the ways in which these artworks create the conditions of possibility for new politics by re-articulating the connection between the political and the universal.