Discussion

This ar cle is intended to lead in to an upcoming PhD project, “The Intellectual History of Soviet and Russian Opera onal Art”, which reconstructs the career of opera vnoe iskusstvo from the 1920s to the present as a historically situated concept rather than a stable level of war. Proceeding from the premise that the term’s meaning and authority have been repeatedly made and remade through conceptual interven ons, the ar cle as of now offers a focused contemporary case: modern Russian discourse on opera onal art across two conjunctures: 1) the two years prior to the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine (2020 – early 2022) and 2) the first two years of the war (February 2022 – early 2024).1 The guiding ques on is: through what kinds of interven ons is opera onal art cons tuted and contested in Russian military discourse when expecta ons of modernized warfare collide with the reali es of high-intensity conflict? The ar cle evaluates two hypotheses. First, opera onal art as a floa ng signifier: rather than stabilizing into a single meaning, opera vnoe iskusstvo recurrently func ons as a high-status but seman cally elas c marker of professionalism whose authority derives from its ambiguity. Empirically, this predicts that defini onal variability and shi ing thema c a achments will persist even in apparently codified contexts, while the term’s pres ge and func on remain consistent. Second, ins tu onal primacy: Rather than ideas driving ins tu ons, ins tu onal actors may be the primary determinant; meaning follows organisa onal needs. This predicts that seman c shi s are expected to cluster around ins tu onal needs and organisa onal problem-framings more than around changes in character-of-war narra ves. Methodologically, the ar cle uses a discourse-historical approach (DHA) to analyse opera onal art linking close textual analysis to reconstruc on of ins tu onal, doctrinal, and warme contexts. The analysis proceeds in three steps. Step 1 is the entry-level analysis, mapping the discourse topics in order to establish the seman c macro-posi ons on opera vnoe iskusstvo. Step 2 is the in-depth analysis, tracing discursive strategies in order to iden fy how opera vnoe iskusstvo is invoked to authorize exper se, delimit competence, and render par cular doctrinal conclusions arguable. Finally, the ar cle will conduct a diachronic comparison of the two conjunctures by tracking changes in dominant argumenta on pa erns. This design enables the study to iden fy whether the invasion corresponds to a discursive reweigh ng in how opera vnoe iskusstvo is used to allocate competence and explain outcomes. The preliminary analysis prepared for presenta on draws on a curated set of ar cles from Voennaja mysl’, the Russian Ministry of Defence’s monthly military-theore cal journal; the final study will extend this basis into a broader corpus combining addi onal Russian military periodicals, relevant doctrinal texts, and public statements by senior officials. The choice of Voennaja mysl’ is mo vated by its role as a semi-official venue where doctrinal vocabulary, professional military thinking, and ins tu onal priori es are ar culated in rela vely stabilized form, making it a suitable site for tracking both con nuity and change in the authorita ve use of opera vnoe iskusstvo across the pre-invasion and warme conjunctures. The final ar cle is intended for publica on in Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies.