"New Stability, Democracy and Nationalism in Contemporary Russia"
Authors are invited to submit papers for the workshop that takes place within the framework of the research project “Discourses on Democracy and National Identity in Russia”, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The Project is aimed at explaining Russia’s overall political stability and the increasing popular acceptance of the regime achieved in the period 2000-2008. Adopting the terminology developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, research will focus on the new discourses on democracy and national identity.
The workshop, conducted with a focused number of participants, aims at refining the key theoretical concepts (such as “dislocation”, “populism”) and providing additional impulses and points of reference for the project’s empirical phase.
The seminar will be guided by the following central assumptions:
- Transitology and derivate approaches with underlying assumptions of democratizations are not helpful for explaining Russia’s unique political configuration.
- A discursive theory of hegemony might, instead, provide the necessary tools to grasp the changes that have taken place since the end of the CPSU’s reign
- Russian transformation in the 1990s is thus primarily perceived here as a crisis of identity, which manifests itself especially a) on the level of the political system and b) on the level of national identity.
- Putins advent to power initiated a process of political stabilization and surmounting of state failure.
- This stability manifested itself in new political discourse(s): it addressed aforementioned uncertainties and alleviated them.
- Concepts like “Sovereign Democracy”, for instance, underscored Russian autonomy and uniqueness, as well as its independence from Western interference, both regarding political practice and political ideas.
- Parties of power, especially Edinaya Rossiya, unite different demands and represent a new unity and consensus, playing the role of “big tent”/catch-all parties.
- Finally, the president turned to play a pivotal role in Russian politics more than ever: as a player supra partes, as a guarantor of unity; a position underscored by high rates of approval throughout Putin’s terms.
According to Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse, however, no hegemony is complete or permanent. There are always counter-hegemonic interpretations, dissenting voices beneath the surface. This also applies to Russia. There, diverging positions, different interpretations and views of democracy are discernible, inter alia, in civil society.
Panels:
- Theorising dislocations as external events not representable in a discourse
- Theorising populism
- Glasnost and Perestroika: The collapse of the Soviet discourse
- Sources and levels of Russian dislocation in the 1990s
- Russia’s new stability since 2000? Sources and levels of stability
- Fixing democracy’s meaning: new discourses on democracy in Russia
- Fixing the nation’s meaning: new discourses on national identity
Call for Papers:
Authors are invited to submit, by 25 July 2008, a 1500-character abstract including a bibliography.
Schedule:
As of now, please declare your intention of submitting an abstract, which should reach the Workshop secretariat no later than 25 July 2008. Notifications of acceptance will be delivered to authors by 15 August 2008. Please do not hesitate to contact the Workshop secretariat for further information and a detailed draft programme: ivo.mijnssen@stud.unibas.ch.
