ABSTRACT
Through the prism of Putin’s main tool of international projection – the broadcaster, RT – Chapter 2 explores the performative aspects of Russian nationhood in its recursive dimension: the repeated calling into being of Russia by enacting its disposition towards what it simultaneously constructs as other to itself; the staging and contingent adoption of, or ‘playing up to’, external images of the country as a ‘pariah state’; the concomitant effort to negate those images. Analyzed via four post-2014 international news controversies involving RT, such strategies, it is shown, undermine the distinction between soft power (normally pursued by nation states in the legitimate pursuit of global influence) and information war (naked propaganda ploys adopted by states prepared to dissemble to the point of falsehood). Their reciprocal logic, the chapter argues, necessarily binds the national and the subnational, the transnational and the global, nation-building and nation projection in complex ways that both foster and constrain the practices of individual disruptors like RT. This process is facilitated by the digitized media environment whose meanings commute across platforms, from centre to margins and subnational to transnational, with an unprecedented intensity and unpredictability that undercut the very notion of outwardly projecting an inwardly coherent, self-identical nationhood.
