This article advances the notion of "Polar Islam" to describe the birth and structuring of Muslim communities in Russia's Arctic cities. It does not assert that Arctic conditions have created an ...entirely specific Islam; most of the features attributed here to "Polar Islam" can easily be found in other regions of Russia. Yet the climatic conditions, remoteness, and heavy industrial character of these cities contribute to accentuating certain characteristics that mold the social landscape in which Muslims live, thereby offering a fascinating regional case study of the development of Islam. This article first explores the emergence of Islamic symbols-mosques-on the Arctic urban landscape and the institutional struggles around the control of this Polar Islam. It then delves into Muslim communities' cultural adaptation to their new Arctic identity. The blossoming of this Polar Islam confirms that Islam is no longer geographically segregated in its traditional regions, such as the North Caucasus and the Volga-Urals; it has spread to all the country's big cities. In this respect, Arctic cities are at the forefront of Russia's societal transformations.
This paper explores an unknown page of Russia's intellectual history, the trajectory of the Iuzhinskii or Golovin Circle. This underground circle was a key actor of the Moscow Boheme and shaped the ...underground intellectual life from the 1960s to the 1980s. The circle considered that replying to the Soviet regime was to be found not in a rival political ideology, but in metaphysics and search for another level or reality. This esoteric quest contributed to the discovery of Western far right ideological precepts and their introduction in the Soviet and then Russian environments. This group seeks to move beyond classical discourse on Russia's unique and specific path by counterbalancing (but not denying) it with broader references borrowed from what is called esoteric Fascism. In three decades, the Iuzhinskii Circle evolved from Mamleev's understanding of an alternate metaphysics to Golovin's discovery of a provocative counterpolitics, to Dugin's revisiting of Nazi mysticism.
In the post‐Cold War period conspiracy theories have become more fashionable, both as an element for explaining international affairs and as one for rewriting history. In this latter aspect, they ...comprise part of a particularly broad genre, called alternate history. Each of these plural histories of Russia has its own proper focus, in terms of its periods of predilection, of its way of formulating the components of identity (religion, race, culture, state, and so on), and of designation of the enemy. However, nearly all of them use the conspirological framework and its presupposed secret manipulation to articulate the dramaturgy of the nation in logical terms. After a contextualization of the broad domain of alternate history, this article enquires into the modes of nationalist types of alternate history and its multiple conspiracies, and looks in detail at one of its “textbook cases,” so‐called New Chronology. The principal hypothesis defended here is that the conjunction between conspiracy theory and the rewriting of history makes up one of the main instruments for disseminating nationalist theories in today Russia, theories based on a kind of post‐modern, paranoid cultural imaginary.
Tajikistan on the Move Laruelle, Marlene; Commercio, Michele; Boboyorov, Hafiz ...
2018, 2018-05-25
eBook
This collection provides a broad and multidisciplinary examination of contemporary Tajikistan. The contributors analyze the political regime--its stability, legitimacy mechanisms, and patterns of ...centralization--as well as various aspects of its social fabric.
A noted specialist on nationalism and identity issues in Russia and Central Asia reviews three of the main geographical metanarratives circulating in contemporary Russia. These are teleological ...master ideas that seek to explain Russia's essence and place in the world as a function of its territorial size and location. All of them argue that a specific element gives Russia its uniqueness among nations: Russia's territory is larger than other countries in the world and forms a specific continent (Eurasianism); Russia is going higher in the universe (Cosmism); and Russia is going farther north (Arctism). The author proceeds to discuss each metanarrative in turn before outlining their similarities in the concluding section of the paper. These similarities include the shared backgrounds of their leading proponents, their basis in public resentment over perceived slights and injustices of the past, and a conviction that Russia's size and location promise a brighter future. More broadly, she argues that each metanarrative combines conspiracy theories, occult experiences of modernity, and a willingness to transcend political realities.
This examination of the political, social, and cultural changes of Kyrgyzstan since the collapse of the Soviet Union offers tools to go beyond the country's simplistic dual status of being both an ..."island of democracy" and a "failing state" to a more nuanced understanding of its own position and its role in the region.
Russian nationalism has evolved from an anti-Western orientation to a campaign of identification with "white Europe" against a growing influx of "peoples of color" that imperils Russia's unique ...civilization.
Today, Russian influence on the African continent is still anecdotic compared to the People's Republic of China, the United States, and former colonial powers, such as France. Yet, Moscow has ...committed to reasserting itself as an alternative pole of influence to China and Western countries in the eyes of some African elites. This article analyzes two key components of Russia's African toolkit: its media outlets such as RT and Sputnik, which have managed to impose themselves on the African media landscape, and its entrepreneurs of influence, in charge of influence campaigns of different scopes. The article contends that Russia's media success relies more on the appropriation of its informational content by African actors with their own political agendas than on Moscow convincing African audiences of the legitimacy of its foreign policy or political model, and that entrepreneurs of influence may play a useful, but limited, role in testing new parameters of influence.
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