For more information, see the authors’ accompanying report

For a dialogical internationalist feminist practice

A transnational pacifist feminist manifesto was signed a few weeks ago by 150 prominent feminists from Europe and the Americas, without a single Ukrainian or post-Soviet European feminist among the signatories. Indeed, some Western feminists, close to Ukrainian feminists, refused to sign it. This manifesto reproduces the dominant geopolitical approach according to which the great imperialist powers are the only actors of history. It thus ignores the multi-scale reality and the agency of multiple actors highlighted by the feminist critique of geopolitics. It reduces Putin’s war against Ukraine to a simple inter-imperialist conflict, thus erasing the agency of all Ukrainians. Only one line out of more than thirty is devoted to Ukrainians: “We are with the people of Ukraine who want to restore peace in their lives and demand a ceasefire.”

n 1992, Yeltsin introduced the term “compatriot abroad” (which was suggested by the analyst Sergey Karaganov) to refer to ethnic Russians who now found themselves outside the formal borders of the Russian Federation but had cultural and linguistic ties with Russia.2 The 1993 military doctrine of the Russian Federation held that the suppression of ethnic Russians in the near abroad represented a military threat to Russia. Already in the 1990s, several state programs were created to promote ties with compatriots in the near abroad, but it was the 2008 document Strategy 2020 (Strategia 2020) that emphasized that the interest and security of these compatriots would be militarily protected by Russia.

Russia is also a revisionist state for three main reasons. First, Moscow considers the agreements made with former Soviet states after the dissolution of the Union in 1991 unfavorable to Russia’s national interests and security. Second, the international order created and led by the United States after the end of the Cold War does not recognize Russia’s status as an equal power. And finally, 30 years later, a post-Soviet Russia has only begun to formulate a new national identity with a mixture of themes from its pre- and post-Soviet history, conforming to the borders and agreements with former Soviet republics that emerged after the disintegration of the common state.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was a historic opportunity to undertake a process of transition to democracy in Russia. As Lilia Shvetsova explains, Boris Yeltsin attempted to accomplish this titanic task through four simultaneous revolutions: (1) creating a free market; (2) democratizing political power; (3) transforming the empire into a nation-state; and (4) finding a new role for a country that was already a nuclear power. This project failed because of Russia’s historical legacy, the structural contradictions in the transition process, and personal factors related to Boris Yeltsin (his serious alcoholism and health problems and the appointment of his daughter Tatiana Yumasheva as an “advisor” served to discredit his efforts).

Digital discourse creates a game-like structure in our perception of reality. For everything that happens, every fact we gather, every interpretation of it we provide, we have an ongoing ledger of the “points” we could garner by posting about it online.

Many of the systems we now use online have their structural origins in the world of role-playing games.

The role-playing game is to our century what the novel was to the eighteenth: the social art form epitomizing and evangelizing a new mode of self-creation. Role-playing games became especially popular in the 1980s, fostering a moral panic over the corruption of the youth, and their influence has continued to vastly exceed that of table-top games.

Indeed, there is a case — and I am going to make it here — that the parallel can be fruitfully extended much farther.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was in Beijing for the inauguration of the Winter Olympics on February 4. While there, he also held significant discussions with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on a range of global issues. The lengthy 99-paragraph joint statement that followed their meeting details how Russia and China have come to adopt shared positions on several global and regional issues.

Stephen Vaisey and Omar Lizardo, “Cultural Fragmentation or Acquired Dispositions? A New Approach to Accounting for Patterns of Cultural Change,” Socius 2 (1 January, 2016).

Robert Putnam, “From Generation to Generation” in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community, 2nd ed (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020), 247-276.

Musa al-Gharbi, “Seizing the Means of Knowledge Production” Heterodox Academy (4 August, 2019).

Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” in The Intellectuals: A Controversial Portrait, ed. George Huszar (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1960), 371–84.