Presentations by Streams

This panel explores how the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the authoritarian hardening of the Russian regime at home have transformed intellectual and ideological identities and reconfigured the dividing lines structuring public debates.

The panel examines the regime’s wartime ideological production by looking at its two main dimensions: its evolving ideational content and the plurality of actors involved in idea production, including both individual entrepreneurs of influence and academic institutions. The panel highlights the marketplace dimension of the regime’s ideological production across state and non-state actors. Moreover, the panel includes analysis of the evolution of anti-regime discourse by looking at the development of a new sphere of ideational resistance against the war inside and outside Russia. The panel therefore insists on the continued competitive aspect of intellectual and ideological debates even in wartime.

The panel specifically investigates (1) the formation of a new state ideology and its bucreaucratization process relying on the role of academic institutions in co-authoring the state language, (2) the theorization of a right-wing anticolonialism as one of the new official doctrines, denouncing the West as an epistemological imperialism that has « decentered » Russian identity, (3) the new polarization shaping Russian nationalists’ « identity talk » and (4) the divisions of the Russian philosophical field into exile philosophy and war philosophy.