Mark Bassin: “Contested Geo-Imaginaries of Civilization in Putin's Russia: "Eurasia" or the "Russian World"?”

The seminar will be followed by a Q&A session.

Hybrid event - see the webpage for the Zoom link.

ABSTRACT:

Over the past decade or so, the Putin regime has developed a strong identity discourse about Russia as a self-contained civilization, or “state-civilization”. This seminar focuses on the functional or instrumental dimension of Putinist civilizationism, namely how this discourse is constructed to rationalize and legitimize a geopolitical agenda of expansion and the projection of Russian influence across the former Soviet Union. My basic arguments are that civilizationist ideology in Russia in fact consists of multiple identitarian narratives or imaginaries, and that it is precisely thorough these more specific sub-discourses that its practical functionality is articulated and channeled. In certain respects, these narratives resonate strongly with each other, but at the same time they differ in important ways. This is particularly true in regard to the geopolitical perspectives that they project, implicitly and explicitly. In the seminar, these arguments will be explored through an examination of two leading civilizational narratives of Putinism: Russia as Eurasia on the one hand, and the Russian World on the other.