Ivan Fomin

The project addresses a pressing policy and scholarly question: under what conditions is Putin’s Russia likely to employ military force? In particular, it explores how ideological factors shape Russia’s foreign and security policy and traces the various arguments used to justify Russia’s escalatory and de-escalatory actions in international affairs – both among the Russian ruling class and the general public. The project hypothesizes that although Putin’s ideology has a relatively stable statist core, with the state as its central value, its other elements are relatively fluid. The study seeks to map this flexible ideological landscape by identifying the habitual combinations of ideas that are activated in public discourse, depending on goals and circumstances. The project employs a multimodal toolkit of semiotic analysis, which allows for exploring how those habits of strategic culture are reproduced not only in doctrinal texts and policy documents but also across a broader spectrum of texts and artifacts.