Participants

Paul Robinson²; Anatol Lieven⁴; Matthew Blackburn¹; Richard Sakwa³; Geoffrey Roberts⁵;  ¹ Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Norway;  ² University of Ottawa, Canada;  ³ University of Kent, UK;  ⁴ Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, United States;  ⁵ Royal Irish Academy, Ireland

Discussion

As Paul Robinson explains in his new book Russia’s World Order: How Civilizationism Explains the Conflict with the West, in the past decade civilizational theory has come to dominate Russian official discourse and is being used by the Russian state to provide an ideological justification of its political conflict with the West. It has also become entrenched in domestic educational and cultural policies, including in high school and university curricula. Whereas the West promotes a vision of history that sees all nations as converging on a single social, political, and economic model (that of modern Western liberalism), Russia's political leaders increasingly describe the world as consisting of numerous distinct civilizations, each diverging toward its own unique destination. The Russian state portrays itself as defending the right of all civilizations to chart their own independent course of development and is having some success in using this logic to win allies around the world. This roundtable will offer varying views of this phenomenon and its importance. Participants will discuss issues such as the variations and nuances of Russian civilizationism, the particular version propagated by the Kremlin, the extent to which civilizational rhetoric represents a genuine ideological commitment or is more purely instrumental in character, and the impact of civilizationism on Russia’s relations with the rest of the world. The roundtable will debate Russia’s vision of the new world order, its attractiveness (or otherwise) to the developing world, the extent to which civilizationism serves as a useful weapon in Russia’s geopolitical conflict with the West, and whether the civilizational world order proposed by Russia is a realistic prospect. In this way, the roundtable will illuminate a critical aspect of current international politics.