ABSTRACT
The introductory chapter proceeds as follows. Section 1 consists of an introduction, during which I situate the book thematically. In Section 2, I state my research problem and questions. Section 3 is comprised of the methodology. Section 4 contains key concepts of this work and a rationale for their use. The chapter concludes with Section 5, in which I outline the structure of the work.
In this book, I explore the limits to liberal democratic universalism and US hegemony at both the material and ideational level by way of the example of contemporary Russia, and how select Russian officials, state bodies, and ‘political technologists’, a term I describe below, represent the contemporary global political economy. As the Russian political economy becomes selectively integrated into the global capitalist political economy, it would appear that there is little discursive space for articulating Russia’s samobytnost’ or uniqueness. However, such integration involves considerable state involvement, which is reflected in Russian state attempts to articulate a response to liberal democratic universalism and American hegemony in an environment of geoeconomic and geopolitical contestation. In this response, select Russian officials seek to reject Western triumphalism by appealing to ‘home grown’, but ‘polysemic’, ideas and cultural frames that valorise Russian conduct and question the moral and practical legitimacy of American hegemonic precepts. Collectively, these efforts provide the basis for what may be considered Russian alternative ‘state-sanctioned’ understandings of world order. This book is about the emergence of such understandings during the post-
Soviet conjuncture, with a particular emphasis on the ‘Putin era’ (2000-present) and the unevenly ‘resurgent’ Russia of this era. It is a work that accentuates the ‘semiotic’ (symbolic) and ‘extra-semiotic’ (material) dimensions of state projects amid the prolonged ‘transitional’ Russian political economy. In suggesting here that beliefs are produced by the state, my contribution gauges the role of key state officials and state organs in both opening and circumscribing political imaginations in accordance with projects of ‘world order’ significance.
