Browsing by Author "Morozov, Viacheslav"

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Identity beyond othering: crisis and the politics of decision in the EU’s involvement in Libya
(2018) Morozov, Viacheslav; Leek, Maria
This article focusses on the concept of decision and its significance for identity politics. Constructivist scholarship established long ago that identity and foreign policy are mutually constitutive and that difference and othering are key for the production of identities. As a consequence, constructivist literature on EU foreign policy has focussed on the role of specific others and explored how interaction with them shapes the EU’s identity. Our article turns the attention back inside and looks at the hegemonic struggles around the purpose and meaning of the European project. By analyzing the EU’s reaction to the Libyan events in 2011, we demonstrate how a major international crisis dislocates the identities involved and unleashes a struggle for hegemony between conflicting discursive articulations. Eventually this conflict is resolved through a political decision, which reconfigures the entire ‘global’ outlook on Europe and its role in the world. By defining decision along poststructuralist lines, as distinct from the conventional literature on decision-making, we demonstrate that the use of this conceptual prism helps deepen our understanding of how othering and bordering work to produce and reshape identities. By doing that, we seek to contribute to a better understanding of how identities change in time.
Organic Tradition or Imperial Glory? Contradictions and Continuity of Russian Identity Politics
(2017) Morozov, Viacheslav
Russian identity politics and, more broadly, the country’s development in modern times has been conditioned by two constitutive splits: between the imperial elites and the peasant masses, on the one hand, and between Russia and Europe, on the other. The current conservative turn aims to overcome the internal split by attuning state policy to mass consciousness, with its alleged preference for ‘traditional values’. This strategy ignores the fact that today’s Russia is a modern, urbanised society. In the long run, it undermines the Kremlin’s effort to achieve and consolidate great power status.
Russia's Internal Otherness
(Yale Global, 2018) Morozov, Viacheslav
Russian Society and the Conflict in Ukraine: Masses, Elites and National Identity
(Bristol: E-International Relations, 2017) Morozov, Viacheslav
This chapter looks at how Russian society reacted to the conflict in and with Ukraine. The main object of interest is popular views of the conflict and its context, and in particular the way these views are conditioned by nationalism and the national identity discourse. The mass support for the Kremlin cannot be explained as just a result of the official propaganda. It hardly creates any new meanings: rather, it feeds on the mass common sense. The way the ordinary Russians comprehend the conflict in and with Ukraine is fundamentally conditioned by nationalism, combined with the distrust of the West, but this nationalism is not necessarily xenophobic and aggressive. While the concept of Russia as a divided nation is key to the understanding of Russian national identity and foreign policy, it is also extremely vague and open to a number of incompatible interpretations. It can be read in ethnic nationalist, imperialist and even civic terms. As a result, Russian nationalism can, in principle, be compatible with a rather broad range of actual policies.