«Патриотизм» и религиозная идентичность в тисках политической игры: дискурсивное измерение (Religious and patriots identity in the grip of political game: a critical discourse analysis)

в статье рассматриваются новые направления включения и исключения в российском обществе. Усиление законодательства о безопасности, которое ускорилось после панк-выступления Pussy Riot в Храме Христа Спасителя и волна гражданских про- тестов, которые вспыхнули до и после президентских выборов 2012 года, послужили ос- нованием для строительства новых форм идентичности. С того времени главные раздели- тельные дискурсы и цензурная деятельность были предложены представителями Русской Православной Церкви, так называемыми патриотическими активистами и защитниками традиционных российских норм. Таким образом, эти идентичности стали политическим инструментом идеологической борьбы на культурной террит…

Production of Cultural Policy in Russia: Authority and Intellectual Leadership

The paper discusses different frameworks of knowledge production within the discourses and practices of Russian cultural policy. Russian cultural policy as an administrative sector has been developed in line with two distinctive governmental regimes, more precisely during the period of liberal decentralisation of the 1990s and the conservative centralisation from 2011 up until today. The study focuses on the main changes that have occurred in the framework of policy design and participation in policy-making. An attempt is made to combine Foucauldian analytical frameworks of power and discourse with a Gramscian hegemonic approach to political studies that was mainly advocated by the Essex sc…

Russia and the EU. Spaces of Interaction

Russian Cultural Policy : From European Governance towards Conservative Hegemony

‘To Make a People Out of a Mere Population’: Sovereignty and Governmentality in Hegemonic Russian Cultural Policy

Abstract The paper claims that contemporary Russian cultural policy has been determined by political transformations associated with the political project to establish sovereignty that has organized Putin’s regime since 2012. The idea behind it is traced to Putin’s 2006 intention ‘to make a people out of a mere population’. To understand that intention, and to explain the contribution of culture and cultural policy to its concretization, the paper draws on Foucault’s account of sovereignty and governmentality, and the development of the Gramscian notion of hegemony. The paper argues that Putin’s regime uses governmentality in its hegemonic project to establish sovereignty. To describe that …

Precarious Sovereignty in a Post-Liberal Europe : the Covid-19 Emergency in Estonia and Finland

The paper addresses a puzzle resulting from the current global state of alert: the coronavirus pandemic brought us back to the world of the allegedly sovereign nation states with borders and national governments in charge, yet in fact, this retrieved sovereignty looks very vulnerable and precarious. We explain this controversy through a triad of concepts—sovereignty, governmentality, and post-liberalism—that we apply to an analysis of a corona-imposed state of emergency in Estonia and Finland. Based on comparative case study research, we posit that sovereignty is precarious in post-liberalism due to its large dependence on the technologies of responsibilization and agency. From a biopolitic…

Russia’s cultural policy abroad as a projection of the “Russian World”

The policy review discusses the recent developments in Russian cultural policy. These developments incorporate Russian culture into its geo-political ambitions. Obviously, the war in Ukraine makes these developments relevant. However, this review piece also seeks to explain the place of cultural policy in the Russian political system and the scope of its geopolitical ambitions. nonPeerReviewed

Biopolitics and Hegemony in Contemporary Russian Cultural Policy

Since 2011, Russian ‘licensing civil society’ 1 has predominated through censorship and the restrictive regulation of arts and cultural societies. The current conservative project has turned artistic space into public space, indicating moral abuse and a threat to the spiritual health of the Russian nation. Consequently, the symbolic borders of human creativity and individual freedom in arts and cultural societies have been reduced to patriotism, nationalism and moral deductive functions of the state-approved program. This paper will explore Russian state cultural policy and argue that biopolitics is its mainstream strategy. It examines how the ensemble of sovereign and disciplinary power de…

Commissioned Book Review : Aliaksei Kazharski, Eurasian Integration and the Russian World: Regionalism as an Identitary Enterprise

Conflictual Rebordering: The Russia Policies of Finland and Estonia

This article seeks to analyse the process of conflictual rebordering in the EU’s relations with Russia. The authors single out three major crises that triggered and shaped the process of toughening the border regime and the related transformations of political meaning of the EU-Russia border: the COVID-19 pandemic, the drastic deterioration of Moscow-Brussels relations in the beginning of 2021 and the war in Ukraine that started on 24 February 2022. Correspondingly, the EU’s reactions to each of these critical junctures might be described through the academic concepts of governmentality, normativity and geopolitics. Our aim is to look at the three ensuing models – governmental, normative an…

Governing the Pandemic in Finland and Estonia

In this article, we analyze the management and political implications of COVID-19 in two small countries located at the EU’s north-eastern border: Finland and Estonia. Culturally, ethnically, and linguistically, they share a common Finno-Ugrian identity. Politically, both are parliamentary republics run by coalition governments. They were among the first countries in Europe to reopen borders for travel in June 2020 after almost three months of lockdown. Both exhibited the lowest curves of viral spread in relation to the population among countries in the wider area. As they faced the pandemic, we saw that the exceptional measures they swiftly took did not diminish the democratic legitimacy o…

Urgent and consolidated actions are needed to stop the war in Ukraine