Empire of Meaning

Marlene Laruelle, PhD, is Professor at the Luiss Guido Carli University, Rome, Italy. She also serves as Director of the Illiberalism Studies Program, a transatlantic initiative based in Washington, DC, Paris and Rome. Before joining Luiss, Marlene Laruelle was Research Professor at The George Washington University for 15 years and Director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) there. Trained in political theory, her research explores contemporary ideologies in Russia, Europe, and the United States, as well as the transnational nature of illiberalism.

• Introduction Part 1: Ideological Foundations of the Russian State 1. The Empire of Meaning 2. Decontesting the Past: The Narrative of Russian Statehood and the Ideology of Putin’s Regime 3. A Never-Ending Rupture: The Contested Memory of Perestroika in Russia Part 2: Affect, Moral Sovereignty and Epistemic Closure 4. Slovo Patsana and the Aesthetics of the Russian Antiworld 5. The Phantasmatic Dimension of Culture Wars: The Case of Social Conservatism 6. Expo ‘Russia’: Narrating Past, Present and Future of Russia’s One Big Happy Family 7. Wave Genetics, DNA Genealogy, Telegony: Narratives of Pseudoscience in Contemporary Russia Part 3: War as Ideological Catalyst 8. What role did ideology play in triggering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? 9. Russian Propaganda Tactics in Wartime Ukraine 10. Russian Voenkory as ‘Affective Entrepreneurs’ and the Mediatization of ‘Moral Sovereignty’ 11. Politicized Law Enforcement and Its Ideological Orientation Part 4: Diffusion and Projection 12. Faith in Foreign Policy: The Geopolitics of Russian Orthodoxy in the Global South 13. The Concept of Neocolonialism in the Russian Regime’s Ideology 14. Russia’s “Anticolonialism” and the Design of an Illiberal International Disorder