Paper Short Abstract:

The paper examines the political effects of geopolitical imaginaries and their intersection with the "state-civilization" narrative in shaping the modes of political engagement on the ground in contemporary Russia.

Paper Abstract:

The paper explores the ways in which geopolitical imaginaries inform perceptions of the state and state-citizen relations in Russia. It asks how tracing the role and political effects of these imaginaries helps us understand the dynamics of society's response to the state's radicalizing politics and policies, including Russia's war on Ukraine. I examine the interplay between state ideological narratives, which draw on geopolitical tropes, and the interpretive frameworks and strategies through which people on the ground make sense of unfolding developments. Inquiring how the global is constructed through the framework of the national (Fernandes 2000), I ask about the specificity of geopolitical imaginaries that emerge with the rise of the "state-civilization" narrative in Russian political discourse and its connection to the notion of multiple modernities. I further identify the models of relationships between the state and citizens that this geopolitically driven politics imposes and how it redefines the idea of a nation-state and classical nationalism. Further, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Moscow and Smolensk in 2015-2019, I analyze the ways these geopolitical and civilizational narratives are translated and embraced by citizens on the ground, including discrepancies and convergences with the official discourse. I consider how such frameworks become congruent with authoritarian governance and, alternatively, provide a potential basis for political critique. In particular, I describe how the Russian state is perceived as a reified historical subject within the global geopolitical constellation and how this perception shapes the modes of political engagement.