Imperism as political nomos in Russia and beyond

ABSTRACT

This article proposes the concept of ‘imperism’ as an analytical tool apt to describe political processes in Putin’s Russia and beyond. Imperism denotes an ontological orientation, or nomos (the term derives from theories of religion and politics by Berger and Schmitt), that undergirds a plurality of civic positions, informs policy, and fundamentally casts imperialness as a political entity’s normal, desirable state. Russia’s imperist nomos shall be explored in its key dimensions, including cosmology, authority, sociology, and aesthetics. However, imperism’s analytical purchase is not limited to the Russian case. In particular, this paper considers the merits of this category vis-à-vis an array of related but distinct concepts: imperialism, authoritarianism, fascism, nationalism, and irredentism. On those grounds, it will be argued that Putinist Russia’s military adventurism manifests a peculiar, imperist form of imperialism; that the Putin regime, albeit hard to categorise, appears to share an imperist nomos with historical fascisms; and that imperism’s ultimate scope exceeds that of nationalist irredentism. The paper ends with a reflection on the advantageous epistemological potentialities of imperism as a category.

Acknowledgements

The writing of this article has benefited from conversations with friends and colleagues including Ed Pulford, Duccio Basosi, Mansur Gazimzyanov, Davide Ermacora, and Tommaso Manzon. Though the opinions here expressed are mine only, as mine only is the responsibility for any mistakes or inaccuracies, I am grateful for the input I received from those exchanges. I also thank the reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term political ontology echoes anthropologists such as Mario Blaser (Id. 2009. Political Ontology. Cultural Studies 23 (5-6): 873-896) but decline it differently. Blaser engages with Indigenous worlds that exceed the strictures of (European) modernity; in this paper, too, it is modernity that is ultimately at stake, but it cannot be claim that imperism exceeds it: in fact, the opposite is probably true. Due to space limitations, any in-depth reflection on imperism’s relationship with modernity must be deferred to a later phase of the conversation.

2 De Bendern S. 2022. Exposing Russia’s alternative reality protects Europe. Chatham House (26 January 2022) https://www.chathamhouse.org/2022/01/exposing-russias-alternative-reality-protects-europe; Hopkins V. 2022. Ukrainians Find That Relatives in Russia Don’t Believe It’s a War. The New York Times (6 March 2022) https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/world/europe/ukraine-russia-families.html; Tondo L. and Rice-Oxley M. 2022. ‘They don’t believe it’s real’: how war has split Ukrainian-Russian families. The Guardian (18 March 2022) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/18/ukraine-russia-families-divided-over-war.

3 Quoted in Anthony A. 2023. Mikhail Shishkin: ‘The main enemy of Russian culture is the Russian regime.’ The Guardian (2 April 2023) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/02/mikhail-shishkin-my-russia-war-or-peace-interview-letter.

4 Some readers hailing from political sciences and international relations have observed that this piece does not focus on the ‘elites’ operating within the Putin system and vying for hegemony, including on the ideological level: while that remark is not untrue, it might reveal more about these readers’ disciplinary expectations than about this article’s argument. I do not assume that an imperist nomos is necessarily shared across Russia’s contradictory political system, nor that it is explicitly ‘professed’ by all the operator in the vertical of power. A nomos is not an ideological line, even less a doctrine, but rather a consensus-generating ontological resource that can be activated in times of crisis. Further interdisciplinary research, and tighter dialogue between political scientists and anthropologists, discourse-oriented and ethnography-based scholars, may illuminate concrete ways in which such resource is activated – be it from the top down or the bottom up – and turned into hegemonic discourse.

5 Berger P. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Open Road, 2003 1966), p. 27.

6 Blaser M. 2009: 877; Zigon J. 2017. Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding (New York: Fordham Press), p. 4-5; as Zigon notes, the enactment of these ‘speculative theories of being’ is able to ‘partly shape existence,’ cit.: 6. Also see Holbraad M. and Pedersen M. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

7 Berger 2003: 28.

8 Schmitt C. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press, 2003), p. 70, emphasis added.

9 Id: 72-75

10 M.A. Dean. A Political Mythology of World Order: Carl Schmitt’s Nomos. Theory, Culture & Society, 23:5 (2020), pp. 1–22; Elden S. Reading Schmitt geopolitically: Nomos, territory and Großraum. Radical Geography 161 (May/Jun 2010).

11 Despite compatible epistemological orientations and a shared focus on the post-Soviet space, the concept of imperism advance herein performs a different function than the category of ‘imperial situation’ as advanced by the Ab Imperio scholarly network (see Gerasimov I., Glebov S. and Mogilner M. Hybridity: Marrism and the Problems of Language in the Imperial Situation. Ab Imperio 1/2016 (2016), pp. 27-68). The latter amounts to an analytical tool for the historiography of imperial and post-imperial societies as/through matrices of overlapping differences, while this paper focuses on the political ontologies underpinning Putinism and related phenomena.

12 Indeed, imperial myths and doctrines (the Third Rome, tsardom, autocracy, the gathering of the Rus’ lands …) have played an important role at crucial moments in Russian history, arguably paving the way the consolidation of an imperist nomos: these myths and doctrines have recently been systematised for a broad readership by Orlando Figes in Id. 2022. The Story of Russia. London: Bloomsbury.

13 D. R. Marples (ed.). The War in Donbas: Origins, Contexts, and the Future (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2021); D. Volkov & A. Kolesnikov. Alternate Reality: How Russian Society Learned to Stop Worrying About the War (Working Paper). (Berlin: Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, 2023).

14 P. Pomerantsev. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014); A. Ostrovsky. The Invention of Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News (London: Penguin, 2017); N. Karpchuk & B. Yuskiv. Dominating Concepts of Russian Federation Propaganda Against Ukraine (Content and Collocation Analyses of Russia Today). Politologija 102:2 (2021), pp. 116-152; S. Krishnarajan & J. Tolstrup. Pre-war experimental evidence that Putin's propaganda elicited strong support for military invasion among Russians. Science Advances 9 (2023), p. eadg1199.

15 Anecdotal evidence suggests that this also applies to some former critics of the Kremlin. High-profile examples include leftist (non-systemic) opposition militant Sergei Udaltsov, who supports war in Ukraine on Soviet patriotism grounds, and formerly liberal (systemic) politician Sergei Mironov, who morphed into a virulent anti-Ukraine hawk. Anecdotally, I may add that I am acquainted with academics, left-leaning intelligentsia, and Tatar cultural activists who, despite having long been at odds with the Kremlin, rallied around Putin over Ukraine.

16 Krishnarajan & Tolstrup’s study (cit.) highlights both Putin supporters’ proclivity to support war-making as a tool to resolve international disputes, and their reluctance to de-escalate even if signalled to do so by the country’s leader. According to this study, Putin himself would have a hard time defusing bellicose feelings in his own following, suggesting that, in part of Russian society, warlike impulse may proceed from the bottom up as much as from the top down. Still, society is far from homogeneous, as remarked by Vladimir Milov in Id., 2022, ‘Saying “Nothing Will Ever Change in Russia” Is Not Only Unhelpful, It Is Wrong’ (April 19, 2022) https://thinktank.4freerussia.org/politics/saying-nothing-will-ever-change-in-russia-is-not-only-unhelpful-it-is-wrong/.

17 G. Marcus & M. Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).

18 E. Pain Russia between Nation and Empire. Russian Politics & Law 47:2 (2014), pp. 60-86; E. Pain. The imperial syndrome and its influence on Russian nationalism. In Kolstø P. (ed.), The New Russian Nationalism: Imperialism, Ethnicity and Authoritarianism 2000–2015 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 6–74.; V. Morozov. Russia’s Postcolonial Identity: A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2015): Palgrave Macmillan; T. Kuzio. Imperial nationalism as the driver behind Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Nations and Nationalisms 29:1 (2022), pp. 30-38. M. Van Herpen. Putin's Wars: The Rise of Russia's New Imperialism, Third Edition (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024).

19 Levada Yu. (ed.). Sovetskii prostoi chelovek: Opyt sotsial'nogo portreta na rubezhe 90-kh. (Moscow: Mirovoi ocean, 1993), p. 23

20 Alexey Leonkov, on state TV channel Rossiya-1, June 2022. Such statements are ubiquitous in Kremlin-approved TV.

21 M. Laruelle. Is Russia Fascist? Unraveling Propaganda East and West. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), pp. 90-99; S. Medvedev. Nikolai Mitrokhin: ‘Eto natsionalism rossiiskikh voennykh’. Radio Svoboda (26 March 2023). https://www.svoboda.org/a/nikolay-mitrohin-eto-natsionalizm-rossiyskih-voennyh-/32331596.html.

22 A. Chubais. Missiya Rossii v XXI veke. Nezavisimaya Gazeta (01 October 2023) https://www.ng.ru/ideas/2003-10-01/1_mission.html. A. Arkhipova, E. Sokiryanskaya., I. Kozlova., M. Gavrilova, D. Dorodin, S. Belyanin. Leviy povorot? Rossiiskie levye partii i dvizheniya i sotsial’no-politicheskie vsglyady robochikh: Sistemnye i nesistemnye levye v sovremennoy Rossii. Moscow (unknown publisher or self-published, 2019). This is not the place for a reflection on what it means to be ‘left-wing’ in Russia vs what it means in Western countries. Note, however, that in the two contexts, leftism relates differently to the state, organization, Marxist theory and post-Marxist critique, and the international order: historical contingencies that in part contribute to explaining the absence of a mass anti-war movement in Russia.

23 R. Zaporozhchenko. The End of “Putin’s Empire?” Ontological Problems of Russian Imperialism in the Context of the War against Ukraine, 2022, 2023. Problems of Post-Communism https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10758216.2022.2158873.

24 M. Blackburn. Mainstream Russian Nationalism and the “State-Civilization” Identity: Perspectives from Below. Nationalities Papers 49:1 (2020), pp. 1-19; Laruelle 2021: 96, 110, 123, 146; Shnirelman V. 2022. Russia as a Katechon: ‘Civilizationism’ and Eschatological Discourse in Putin’s Russia. Russia Post https://www.russiapost.info/society/katechon.

25 R. Greenfield. 2023. Navalny's Policy Shift on Crimea May Be Too Little, Too Late. The Moscow Times (7 March 2023) https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/03/07/navalnys-policy-shift-on-crimea-may-be-too-little-too-late-a80396. Crimea has come to enjoy a salient place in the myth of ‘Holy Russia,’ being associated with the baptism of ancient Rus’ ruler Vladimir.

26 Krishnarajan & Tolstrop 2023.

27 A. Dugin. 2016. Carl Schmitt’s Five Lessons for Russia. https://eurasianistarchive.com/2016/10/12/carl-schmitts-5-lessons-for-russia/; on Eurasianism, see M. Laruelle. Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire. (Washinton DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008); M. Bassin, S. Glebov. & M. Laruelle. (eds.) Between Europe and Asia: The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015); S. Glebov. From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship, and Ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s–1930s. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017); N. Friess. and K. Kaminskij. (eds.). Resignification of Borders: Eurasianism and the Russian World. (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2019).

28 J. O’Loughlin, G. Toal, and V. Kolosov. Who identifies with the “Russian World”? Geopolitical attitudes in southeastern Ukraine, Crimea, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria. Eurasian Geography and Economics 57:6 (2016), pp. 745–778; Friess and Kaminsky 2019; M. Pieper. Russkiy Mir: The Geopolitics of Russian Compatriots Abroad. Geopolitics 25:3 (2020), pp. 756–779; Hybrid Warfare Analytical Group. 2021. “Russkiy Mir” as the Kremlin’s Quasi-ideology. Ukraine Crisis Media Center (28 May 2021). https://uacrisis.org/en/russkiy-mir-as-the-kremlin-s-quasi-ideology?fbclid=IwAR2AYhEpm2yDMZEd6a0DQdiwRH-FZ5F5BZaOSUULMndk36z6ddrXOF9ebaU; Kucher S. 2022. ‘Russkiy mir’: What Putin’s worldview tells us about the war in Ukraine, the Russian people and himself. Grid (7 July 2022) https://www.grid.news/story/global/2022/07/07/russkiy-mir-what-putins-worldview-tells-us-about-the-war-in-ukraine-the-russian-people-and-the-kremlin-leader-himself/; Zaporozhchenko 2023: 6-8.

29 cf. P. Lövgren. Responsibility to Protect, Eurasianism, or Russkiy Mir? MA thesis in International Relations with specialisation in Global Political Economy Department of Economic History and International Relations, University of Stockholm, Spring 2022.

30 V. Chernyshuk. How the ‘Russian world’ concept propels Russian aggression in Ukraine. Euromaidan Press (10 April 2014), 2014. https://euromaidanpress.com/2014/10/04/russkiy-mir-russian-world-implanted-in-ukrainian-cage/; Kamusella T. 2021. Politics and the Slavic Languages. London/New York: Routledge, 152-169.

31 See below, point 4; also see S. Kotkin. Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, esp. distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer empires’, p. 21; cf. T. Martin. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Zaporozhchenko 2023. F. Billé and C. Humphrey. Shifting spatial metaphors in Russia at a time of war. Territory, Politics, Governance (2024) online first.

32 P. D’Anieri. Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War. (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 32-34.

33 A. Osborn. Gorbachev died shocked and bewildered by Ukraine conflict – interpreter. Reuters (2 September 2022), 2022. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/gorbachev-died-shocked-bewildered-by-ukraine-conflict-interpreter-2022-09-01/; Osborn 2022; Lewis P., Nixey J. 2022. Gorbachev's complex legacy is beyond the popular belief. Chatham House (3 September 2022) https://www.chathamhouse.org/2022/09/gorbachevs-complex-legacy-beyond-popular-belief.

34 A. Panchenko. Saving the World: How Messianic Sentiments, Memory Politics, and Conspiracy Theories Made Putinism Effective. Fieldsights (March 11) (2022). https://culanth.org/fieldsights/saving-the-world-how-messianic-sentiments-memory-politics-and-conspiracy-theories-made-putinism-effective.

35 S. Elden. Reading Schmitt geopolitically: Nomos, territory and Großraum. Radical Geography 161: May/Jun 2010 (2010); P Pizzolo. Eurasianism: An Ideology for the Multipolar World. (Washington DC: Lexington Books, 2022); Zaporozhchenko 2023: 2, 4; cf. Schmitt 2003.

36 D. Graeber., M. Sahlins. On Kings. (Chicago: HAU Books, 2017).

37 M. Poe. The Russian Moment in World History. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 50-54, 64-70; Figes 2022.

38 W. Zimmerman. Ruling Russia: Authoritarianism from the Revolution to Putin. (Princeton: Prienceton University Press, 2016).

39 M. Laruelle & J. Radvanyi. Russia: Great Power, Weakened State. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).

40 S. Davies. The “Cult” of the Vozhd’: Representations in Letters, 1934-1941. Russian History 24:1-2 (1997), pp. 131-147.

41 F. Weir. With Russians feeling besieged, some give Putin a loaded title: vozhd. The Christian Science Monitor (2 April 2018), 2018. https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2018/0402/With-Russians-feeling-besieged-some-give-Putin-a-loaded-title-vozhd.

42 W. Mazzarella. The Mana of Mass Society. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); B. Meyer, M. Van de Port. Introduction: Heritage Dynamics: Politics of Authentication, Aesthetics of Persuasion and the Cultural Production of the Real. In Id. (eds.), Sense and Essence: Heritage and the Cultural Production of the Real. (London/New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 1-39.

43 Levada 1993: 11.

44 C. Humphrey. Alternative Freedoms. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 151:1 (2007), pp. 1-110, P. 6, cf. T. Snyder. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018); P. Valliere. Ivan Ilyin: Philosopher of law, force, and faith. In Valliere P, Poole R. (eds.). Law and the Christian Tradition in Modern Russia. (Oxon/New York: Routledge, 2022), pp. 306-327.

45 M. Laruelle. How Islam Will Change Russia. Ponars Eurasia (15 September 2016), 2016. https://www.ponarseurasia.org/how-islam-will-change-russia/.

46 E. Lazzerini. The Volga Tatars in Central Asia, 18th-20th Centuries: From Diaspora to Hegemony? (Washington DC: The National Council for Soviet and Est European Research, 1993); A. Frank. Islamic Transformation on the Kazakh Steppe, 1742-1917: Toward an Islamic History of Kazakhstan under Russian Rule. In Hayashi T. (ed.) 2003. The Construction and Deconstruction of National Histories in Slavic Eurasia. (Sapporo: Slavic research Center, Hokkaido University, 2003), pp. 261-289; E. Tasar. Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia, 1943-1991. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), esp. 242-297; G. Yusupova. Tatarstan’s Paradiplomacy with the Islamic World. In Laruelle M. (ed.) Russia’s Islamic Diplomacy. (Washington DC: Central Asia Program, The Heorge Washington University, 2019), pp. 37-40.

47 W. Jones. The Chechen Kadyrovtsy’s Coercive Violence in Ukraine. Parameters 53:3 (2023), pp. 117-132.

48 U. Bulag. Collaborative Nationalism: The Politics of Friendship on China’s Mongolian Frontier. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).

49 S. Kordonsky. 2016. Socio-Economic Foundations of the Russian Post-Soviet Regime: The Resource-Based Economy and Estate-Based Social Structure of Contemporary Russia. Stuttgart/Hanover: Ibidem Verlag; Friess and Kaminskij 2019; Zaporozhchenko 2023.

50 G. V. Golosov. Russia’s centralized authoritarianism in the disguise of democratic federalism: Evidence from the September 2017 sub-national elections. International Area Studies Review 21:3 (2018), pp. 231–248.

51 M. Kravchenko. Inventing Extremists: The Impact of Russian Anti-Extremism Policies on Freedom of Religion or Belief, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2018; R. Bekkin. People of reliable loyalty … Muftiates and the State in Modern Russia. (Huddinge: Södertörns högskola, 2020).

52 F. Dudarova. ‘The 300s became 200s’: Baikal battalion crushed in Ukraine while Buryatia authorities stay silent, relatives say. Novaya Gazeta Europe (17 October 2022), 2022. https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2022/10/17/the-300s-became-200s-en; L. Latypova. Russia’s Tatarstan Bans Reservists from Leaving as Mobilization Underway. The Moscow Times (22 September 2022), 2022. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/09/22/russias-tatarstan-bans-reservists-from-leaving-as-mobilization-underway-a78866. Sokirianskaia E. 2023. Bonds Of Blood? State-building and Clanship in Chechnya and Ingushetia. London/New York: Bloomsberg Academic, esp. 211-230.

53 G. Agamben. The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); F. Billé. Auratic Geographies: Buffers, Backyards, Entanglements. Geopolitics, 2021. DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2021.1881490.

54 W. Mazzarella. xThe Mana of Mass Society. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023).

55 M. Maglov, R. Badanin, M. Rubin. 2023. Iron Masks Final Season: The story of how Vladimir Putin’s vassals provided a royal life for Alina Kabaeva and her children, while secret services hid the existence of this family from the rest of the country. The Project (28 February 2023). https://www.proekt.media/en/guide-en/alina-kabaeva-putin-eng/.

56 Nearly three decades ago, in a classic article, Patrick Wolfe lamented the ‘definitional space’ of imperialism turning into a ‘vague […] gestalt’: see P. Wolfe. History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism. American Historical Review 102:2 (1997), pp. 388-420.

57 P. J. Burton. Roman Imperialism. (Leiden: Brill; Wesseling H. 1997, 2019). Imperialism and colonialism: Essays on the history of European expansion. Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press; R.H. Immerman. Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

58 I. Lenin. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. (London: Penguin Books2010 [1917]).

59 M. Hardt. and A. Negri. Empire. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); P. Lamarche, M. Rosenkrantz, & D. Sherman. (eds.) Reading Negri: Marxism in the Age of Empire, (Chicago and La Salle (IL): Open Court, 2011).

60 S. Plokhy. Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation. (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Slezkine Yu. Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Socialism. The Russian Review 59:2 (2000), pp. 227-234; Zaporozhchenko 2023. Also see Pain, 2014, cit.; Pain, 2015, cit.; Kuzio, 2022, cit.; Van Herpen, 2024, cit.

61 Laruelle 2021: 88-90, 146-150.

62 Slezkine 2000.

63 I. Matveev. 2016. Russia, Inc. OpenDemocracy (16/03/2016); Ovsyannikova A. 2016. Is neoliberalism applicable to Russia? A response to Ilya Matveev. OpenDemocracy (20/05/2016).

64 G. Gill. Building an Authoritarian Polity: Russia in Post-Soviet Times. (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015); W. Zimmerman. Ruling Russia: Authoritarianism from the Revolution to Putin. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

65 Laruelle 2021; M. Laruelle. So, Is Russia Fascist Now? Labels and Policy Implications. The Washington Quarterly 45:2 (2022), pp. 149-168

66 I am inclined to contend that the Russian (Putinist) case is a helpful case test to (re)imagine what fascism can be in the 21st century, but that reflection would need an ad-hoc separate paper.

67 It must be re-emphasized that imperism does not imply monarchism: fascist Italy’s nomos basileus was the duce, not the king, while the Third Reich was headed by a chancellor, as Kaiserdom had been abolished.

68 C. Seton-Watson. Italy’s Imperial Hangover. Journal of Contemporary History 5:1 (1980), pp. 169-179; D. Rodogno. Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation during the Second World War (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006); P. Bernhard. Borrowing from Mussolini: Nazi Germany's Colonial Aspirations in the Shadow of Italian Expansionism. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41:4 (2013), pp. 617-643; P. Bernhard. Colonial crossovers: Nazi Germany and its entanglements with other empires. Journal of Global History 12:2 (2017), pp. 206–227. Note that, though fascism is promptly associated to ethno-racial discrimination and exclusion, the lens of imperism help to bring into sharper focus the patterns of presumed ethnic (and racial) inclusivity – which may well be ranked or hierarchised – that may underpin fascist civilising and world-making pretensions.

69 Shnirelman 2022, cit.

70 Figes, cit.

71 Kuzio, cit.

72 V. Putin New Year Address to the Nation, 2022. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/70315. See Allison R. 2023. Russia’s Case for War against Ukraine: Legal Claims, Political Rhetoric, and Instrumentality in a Fracturing International Order. Problems of Post-Communism, DOI: 10.1080/10758216.2023.2254915.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matteo Benussi

Matteo (Teo) Benussi is a social anthropologist specializing in religion, ethics, politics, and heritage in Eurasia and Eastern/Southern Europe. He received his training in Venice (IT), Cambridge (UK), and Berkeley (US). Teo’s current research interests focus on Islamic piety movements, halal practices, and the politics of virtue amongst Muslims in Tatarstan (Russian Federation). Over the past decade he has also been investigating nostalgia, localism, and vernacular Orthodox Christianity in post-Chernobyl Ukraine. He has an abiding interest in non-mainstream, high-intensity, political and spiritual milieus.