Roundtable at Malmö University on the topic of “The Caucasus between Turkey and Russia” at the annual meeting of the Research Collegium of the Swedish Research Institute , Istanbul (https://srii.org/), hosted by RUCARR.
Presenters: PhD Candidate Michel Anderlini, Dr George Mchedlishvili, Dr Natia Gamkrelidze, Dr Kamal Makili-Aliyev, Prof. Karina Vamling. Moderator: Prof. Bo Petersson.
A warm thank you to all contributors at the Symposium – presenters at campus and in online panels. And thank you for all good and inspiring discussions! Symposium program and abstracts
Registration required for zoom and webinar links. [check for program updates]
10.00 Opening of the Symposium
— Dr. Liudmyla Pidkuimukha (Justus Liebig University Giessen) Weaponizing Language: How Russia Commits Linguicide on the Occupied Territories of Ukraine
—Svetlana L’nyavsky (Lund University): I am a Russian Ukrainian, but I will not learn Ukrainian just for you! Language ideological debates, linguistic vigilantism, and Internally Displaced People at the time of war
— Solomija Buk, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Department of General Linguistics: Ukrainian for Foreigners in Russian-Ukrainian War: Changes and Challenges
— Juldyz Smagulova and Kara Fleming (College of Humanities and Education, at KIMEP University, Almaty, Kazakhstan): Shame and struggles for power: New speakers of Kazakh in Kazakhstan—
— Edward Lemon (Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University) and Oleg Antonov (visiting researcher at GPS and RUCARR, Malmö University; visiting researcher at Södertörn University): Academic Diplomacy: The Educational Aspects of Russian Soft Power in Tajikistan
— Victoria Clement Central Asian Insights): Avoiding a Reckoning: Memory Days and History in Turkmenistan
— PhD candidate Dina Kucherbayeva and Prof. Juldyz Smagulova: Language Revitalization: Challenges for Kazakh in Higher Education
— Emre Pshigusa (U.S. State Department, English Language Fellow): The Circassian language and identity created a feeling of illegality in us” Language Ideologies, Policies, and Circassian Language Rights in Turkey
— Lars Funch Hansen (Circassian Studies) The marginalisation of Circassian language through local history teaching, with cases from Krasnodar Krai including the Black Sea coast
— Valeriya Minakova (Penn State): “It all starts in the family”: Placing discourses on the role of families in Circassian language preservation into a historical-political context
Merab Chukhua (Tbilisi State University and the Circassian Culture Center, Tbilisi): One case of reflecting a historical fact in language
— Otari Gulbani (Central European University MA): Russian Imperial Orientalism in Svaneti: A Discursive Analysis
— Sam Tarpley (Tulane University, Grad stud): Contemporary Deconstruction: Post-Soviet Monuments and the American South
10.15 Welcome (Niagara, 5th floor, C section (Nordenskiöldsgatan 1)
Giorgi Alibegashvili (State Language Department of Georgia) & Maka Tetradze. (State Language Department of Georgia & Tbilisi State University):: Street Georgian – as a Reflection of functioning of the State language in Georgia
Tinatin Bolkvadze (Tbilisi State University & State Language Department): How to assess the functioning of the Russian language in Georgia (online)
Nadiya Kiss (JLU Giessen): Languages at war: Language shift, contested language diversity and ambivalent enmity in Ukraine
Andrey Makarychev (University of Tartu): “Estonian Russophones: A Biopolitical Story”
Mariam Manjgaladze (Caucasus University): Issues of the Official Language Ecology in Contemporary Georgia
Lidia Zhigunova (Tulane University, USA): Russia’s War on Indigenous Languages: The Case of Circassian in the North Caucasus
Moderator: Professor Barbara Thörnquist-Plewa, Central and Eastern European Studies, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University
Dr. Elizaveta Kopacheva will present her thesis “The resource model of political participation 2.0: Protesting in semi-authoritarian regimes – A privilege of the privileged”, that she recently defended at Linnaeus University. Read the abstract here. Welcome!
Internet freedom in Russia: An infrastructural approach, by Dr Mariëlle Wijermars, University of Helsinki
When: April 25th, 15:15-17:00
Where: https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/69356487660
Description: Over the past decade, internet freedom in Russia has dramatically declined as a result of the state’s repressive policies and enhanced digital surveillance and censorship capacities. Yet, looking at the Russian state provides only a partial picture and risks obscuring the agency of various domestic and foreign (private) actors in shaping these processes. This talk shifts focus to the implementation and enforcement of restrictive Internet policies in Russia to examine how the actions of, among others, platform companies can enable, shape or constrain how these policies impact internet freedom.
Bio
Dr Mariëlle Wijermars is a CORE Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies of the University of Helsinki, on leave from her position as Assistant Professor in Cyber-Security and Politics at Maastricht University. Her research focuses on the human rights’ implications of internet policy and platform governance, in particular in authoritarian states. Her work has been published in, e.g., Post-Soviet Affairs, Digital Journalism, New Media & Society, and Information, Communication & Society. She is the editor (with Daria Gritsenko and Mikhail Kopotev) of The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies, published by Palgrave Macmillan (2021), and Freedom of Expression in Russia’s New Mediasphere (with Katja Lehtisaari), published by Routledge (2020).
Welcome to the RUCARR seminar on May 11, 10.00-11.30 with Ass.Prof. Edward Lemon, Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University and Dr Oleg Antonov, researcher at Södertörn University and RUCARR, Malmö University.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led many analysts to predict that its role in Central Asia would decline. While there have been moments of pushback against Russia from the region’s governments, political, economic and security ties remain strong and resilient to change. At the same time, China is capitalizing on Russia’s distraction to make further inroads in Central Asia, becoming less deferential to Moscow, accelerating a trend that existed before February 2022. The speakers will discuss how the region is being affected by the war in Ukraine and what this tells us about the influence of Russia and China.
Dr. Edward Lemon is a Research Assistant Professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University. He previously held positions at the Wilson Center and Columbia University. His research focuses on Russia and China’s influence, authoritarianism and security in Central Asia
Dr. Oleg Antonov is a Researcher at the Department of Global Political Studies, the Faculty of Culture and Society, with Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus Regional Research (RUCARR), Malmö University (supported by the Crafoord Foundation) ant at the same time a Researcher at the Department of Political Science, Södertörn University. His research focuses on authoritarian governance in Central Asia, in particular Russia and China’s influence in the region. He has previously held positions at Uppsala University, University of Amsterdam, University of Gothenburg, University of Heidelberg and University of Fribourg.
Very welcome to join our next RUCARR seminar on April 11 with Evgeny Romanovskiy, Charles University.
WHEN: April 11, 15.15-17.00
WHERE: Sign-up here for zoom link
The Caucasus has always been a mystical region for researchers not only from abroad, but also for Russians, where “traditional methods did not work.” Nevertheless, in this study, the author will lift the veil of the secrets of the formation and development of state policy in nation- and identity building in two republics of the North Caucasus: Chechnya and Dagestan. While Chechnya is a traditional mono-ethnic and mono-religious republic within Russia that has given rise to a “special” kind of nationalism, Dagestan is a «Babel tower of languages and cultures” that represents a different type of nationalism, or lack of it. While using modern social theories, the author of this study [in both cases] will try to prove that the Caucasus went through a difficult, but the same way of forming national identities as other regions of the Earth. This seminar will help to better understand the Caucasus, as well as the processes that took place and are taking place there and that have shaped the image of this region as we know it.
“You’re a disgrace to the uniform!” Lev Protiv’s challenge to the police in Moscow streets and on YouTube by Gilles Favarel-Guarrigues
When: March 7th, 15:15-17:00
Where: On Zoom, link: https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/66776698229
Lev Protiv presents itself as a “social project” intertwining civic involvement, moral policing and entertaining Youtube show. Promoting a healthy lifestyle and pretending to defend the innocent youth, the Moscow vigilantes patrol since 2014 in public spaces in search of people consuming alcohol or smoking and implement governmental bans. However, their targets are not only drunkards and youth subculture, but also the police which are reluctant to implement the law. Sponsored by the government during two years and earning money thanks to their YouTube channel, how to explain that a vigilante activity, openly challenging State authority , may be tolerated in an authoritarian regime? This paper is based on the analysis of the videos of the group and on personal participation in several anti-drinking nocturnal raids. It shows that Lev Protiv has imposed a particular form of police oversight from below, forcing law enforcement officers to act as vigilante auxiliaries, partially in line with the governmental management of civil society.
RUCARR online seminar with visiting researcher Alexandre Kukhianidze, Professor of Political Science, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University University (Georgia).
When: December 13, 15.15-17.00 CET (6.15-8.00 pm Tbilisi)
Where: Zoom link https://mau-se.zoom.us/s/62874227691
Abstract
The online seminar discusses how Russia’s attack on Ukraine in the early morning of February 24, 2022, led not only to a rethinking of international security and stability, of Russia’s entire policy towards its immediate neighbors, but also to international assessments of Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008. The war led to a complication in relations between the ruling “Georgian Dream” party and the Ukrainian leadership, influenced the relationship of the Georgian leadership with the political opposition and leading non-governmental organizations, as well as the relationship of the ruling party to the European Union and the United States. Against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, the Georgian political opposition is increasingly accusing the political leadership of Georgia of pro-Russian orientation, rejection of European and Euro-Atlantic integration and insufficient assistance to Ukraine, attacks by individual representatives of the “Georgian Dream” on the ambassadors of the European Union, the United States and the leadership of Ukraine. Meanwhile, the scale of mass rallies held in Georgia in support of Ukraine and aimed at criticizing the Georgian leadership has sharply decreased by the autumn of 2022, which has an impact on the stability of the latter. Based on personal observations and analysis of the entire post-Soviet period in Georgia, the speaker explains the reasons for the behavior of the Georgian leadership and the public against the backdrop of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
When? November 29th, 15:15.17:00
Where? On Zoom: https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/65931690478
Putin-era patriotism has become mandatory across different social groups and communities in terms of their relationship to the state. In particular, there has been a growing polarization between the construction of patriotic policies and attitudes towards these policies by their targets. As a rule, actors representing Soviet-era generations are increasingly producing patriotism derived from Soviet ideals for generations who lack personal experience of the Soviet Union as well as the 1990s that followed its collapse. At the same time, loyalty building to the authoritarian state, aimed at by patriotic education, is working rather poorly among the youngest Russians.
But what is known about Russians between these poles, between educators and those being educated? What is their attitude towards patriotism and the patriotic education of the Putin era? Russians born in the early 1980s form an important intermediate cohort between the older Soviet-era and younger ‘internet’ generations who came of age within different frameworks of patriotic socialisation. They started school in the last years of the USSR, finished their main schooling before the Putin-era patriotic education programmes began but whose own children are now undergoing them.
In this respect, this cohort has a personal connection to all three dimensions of the Putin-era patriotic policies: 1) the patriotic education of the Soviet era, 2) the “unpatriotic” 1990s, and 3) the patriotic education of the Putin era by living in the most socio-economically active phase under Putin and being parents to children who are central targets of patriotic education. Attitudes of this cohort provide us preliminary information about prerequisites for internalizing Putin-era patriotism by active adults of the 2010s and early 2020s. For this cohort the effect of the Soviet-era patriotism could be seen in their recognition of the virtues of official patriotism, but this identification was by no means political. This implies that the political banality of patriotism in general, something that anyone can share, underlines the overall limits of using patriotism for political purposes.
The presentation is based on a case study published this year (ʻAttitudes to Putin-Era Patriotism Amongst Russia’s ‘In Between’ Generationʼ, Jussi Lassila & Anna Sanina, Europe-Asia Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2022.2088702), which also provides a background for the current situation influenced by Putinʼs invasion of Ukraine.
