 Welcome, everyone, for the final session of the new voices. Rarely has the title of an lecture series been so appropriate, because we have two new voices of the Department of War Studies, of which you will hear quite a bit in the future. I know it's always a bit of a tricky thing to make predictions in the social sciences, especially if they concern the future, but I'm very confident in this case that you will hear quite a bit from Mati Sparra and Rhiannon Ams in the future, in the next couple of years. So let me introduce our speakers today. It's my great pleasure to introduce Mati Sparra, who has completed his MA in International Relations in the last year, with a dissertation on the topic that he will talk about today. It was the great pleasure of being the second marker of this exceptional work. It was the highest marked dissertation in the last year and a justified recipient of an award that I think you have been informed about already. Yes, I received the names. Fantastic, so the communication is working. It's not just in the room here today. Mati is going to talk about a topic which is very much concerning us in war studies. It is related to the so-called military intervention of Russia in Ukraine. And Mati's in this talk today will provide a reading of Vladimir Putin through the lens of decolonial critique. And he's using this entry point to make some potentially groundbreaking comments on critical approaches in international relations. So I'm very interested and very pleased to have you here as part of the New Voices series. And then we have Rhiannon M, who is a PhD student at war studies. You're in the third year right now and she will provide a comment before we then open to Q&A. Mati, the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Hi everyone, I'm Mati Sparra. My PhD research looks at the history and sociology of the discipline of international relations, and I focus on the 1990s. But today I'm going to give a little teaser trailer of my paper titled Putin the Critical Theorist, the Kremlin's Decolonial Critique of International Order and its implications for the study of international politics. And this is my third time presenting this paper. I had the pleasure to present this paper at EISA in Potsdam in a panel that addressed the crisis of critique in international relations. I also presented it in October at Cumberland Lodge with my PhD student colleagues in the department. I'm grateful that I was given the chance to present it here today in my home turf in the Department of War Studies. In the past few years I've become used to attending an organizing seminar here. So it's wonderful to experience these talks from the other side of the table finally, especially among friends, mentors and colleagues and even some of my IR theory students in the first year of their undergraduate studies. So I'm going to talk about 15 to 20 minutes, maybe less. As I said, I will give a little teaser of the argument in the paper. I'll give you guys some context of what I'm doing there. Then I'll walk you through the key moves that I make. These are, first of all, what is my understanding of decolonial critique? Secondly, I'm going to talk a little bit about how decolonial critique is present in Putin's critique of international order. And thirdly, I will briefly discuss the implications of all of this to the study of international politics in general and critical international relations in particular. Let's start with the context. For those of you who are not up to date with the contemporary debates in critical IA, let me give you a brief overview, which maybe then helps you understand of what I'm actually doing in this paper. So it's largely agreed that critical IA is in crisis. The rise of nationalism across the globe, Donald Trump and other post-truth baddies, racism, misogynism, anti-intellectualism, inequality, poverty and power politics are on the rise. And these phenomena are opposed to the commitments of critical theory, emancipation and a better and more just world. And this appears to indicate the failure of critical international relations theory. Even worse, critical theory is also blamed for providing the philosophical basis, which is anti-foundationalism, upon which post-truth politics can and could thrive. So critical theories are accused of writing in an overly complex jargon that is difficult, if not impossible to understand, except if you're trained in and socialized into critical traditions. It is not accessible, it is accused. It also seems that critical theories such as post-structuralism, feminism, post and decolonial theory, queer theory, they do not appear to offer any promising resources to address the current political problems that we're all facing. And these issues have led scholars in IR and in other disciplines to the conclusion that critique is in crisis. And critical IR is at an impasse and in need of a new steam, a new sense of purpose. And scholars are trying to make sense of this new reality. Bertiljarn from the University of Sussex comes to the defense of IR in this context and argues that critical IR has in fact been very successful. Nick McKelson, who's in this room as well, painted even starker picture arguing that the theoretical tradition has disappointed as much as critical IR and that we'd be better off by letting go of the term critical IR scholar completely. So my article is swimming in these muddy waters. I try to think of the next steps for critical IR, both empirically and conceptually. And I argue that Putin is using decolonial tools of critique and he's using the very sophisticated leap and that this is both a challenge and an opportunity for critical international relations. My exploration into this topic began while I was studying decolonial thought with a particular focus on Franz Fanon, I am César and Mahatma Gandhi. And I know Mark Kondo is not here today, but thanks to him, he made me read Gandhi, which I don't think I would have otherwise ever read. So I want to thank Mark Kondo for introducing me to Gandhi's thinking. And in his violent encounters in anti-colonial wars, master's module. So anyway, I was trying to discern the very basics of what is decolonial critique. What are the key attributes that define a critique decolonial? And around the same time as I was reading Gandhi, Fanon and César, I was also reading Walter Mignolo's The Darkest Side of Western Modernity. And quite quickly, and those of you who are not familiar with Walter Mignolo's work, he is one of the prominent decolonial philosophers in our contemporary era. So quite quickly, I arrived at the conclusion that decolonial critique, while it comes in various forms, it comprises three fundamental elements. First of all, it consists of unveiling Western dominance and colonial power. Second of all, it has a discourse around the meaning of indigenous cultures and traditions. And thirdly, it provides an emancipatory vision, a blueprint for a post-colonial future. And these three characteristics take different meanings, different political and ethical logics for each decolonial thinking. And they manifest with different kinds of critical tools in their writing. For example, Mignolo uses the concept of epistemic disobedience, by which he means the practice of unveiling the regional foundations of universal claims to truth and categories of thought and logic that sustains all branches of Western knowledge. And Fanon, for example, uses different kinds of tools, such as turning in historical metanarratives, turning who's the object and who's the subject of history. But I'm going to be talking about these more in depth in due course. So around the time I was reading these decolonial thinkers, I noticed that Putin's critique of international order at its core appeared to embody these very basic characteristics. And I also remember Walter Mignolo's line in his book is that theories are where you can find them. And I was also interested by Putin's recent turn towards an explicitly decolonial language, as evident in his statement in 2022 at the Balda Discussion Club and elsewhere where he talked about these issues where he said, and essentially emancipatory anti-colonial movement against unipolar hegemony is taking shape in the most diverse countries and societies. Now I must say that when I shared my fascination with this idea and these topics with my peers, with my friends, some were quick to dismiss it as a, this is just mere instrumental and hypocritical use of decolonial language, given Russia's historical and imperialistic actions. And it most certainly is hypocritical and there is no question that Russia behaves imperialistically. And how I just couldn't but wonder if there was more depth to Putin's critique than really meets the eye. Indeed, it was the idea put forward by scholars such as Vyacheslav Morozov and Isaac Zarikov that Russia is simultaneously an empire in its so-called near abroad and at the same time a subaltern vis-à-vis the West. And this is what interested me in exploring this topic. So I started reading Putin's foreign policy speeches from early 2000s onwards and I found three recurring concepts. Traditional values, sovereign democracy and unipolarity. And these concepts I came to realize contained a wealth of decolonially critical tools that might not be immediately apparent. So I'm going to go through each concept very briefly now. First, Putin's emphasis on traditional values. It bears striking resemblance to Gandhi's decolonial critique. Much like Gandhi, Putin contends that modern values, modern neoliberal values are eroding tradition, spirituality and duty, leading to moral decay and unhappiness in society. Furthermore, both think to see the European masses who still subscribe to traditional values and spiritual values as sort of co-sufferers in neoliberal modernity. So this kind of identity politics where the masses become sufferers of western modernity is also a decolonially critical tool. And in Putin's traditional values discourse there are also other examples of decolonial tools such as unveiling the parochial origins of modern values and the idea that a true conception of human rights or the meaning of human rights, that these are rooted in all world religions as opposed to the European Enlightenment. And this tool is very similar to what Mignolo calls de-linking from western knowledge systems. And Mignolo also used the concept as zero point epistemology by which he means the emergence of western epistemology as a single objective and neutral way of knowing and classifying the world and its peoples and their problems and solutions according to western theological, philosophical, economic and political logics. And Mignolo provides examples of the colonization of knowledge by narrating how western imperial powers colonized time and space during the Renaissance through powerful metanarratives of historical progress and development. The common story in at least when I studied in high school and in earlier years how the civilizations emerged in ancient Greece and then it moved to Rome then to western Europe and eventually across the globe. Similarly, these kinds of western metanarratives according to Mignolo colonized time as histories read through western historical benchmarks of antiquity, middle ages, Renaissance and so on and that ignores the local histories of the rest of the world. And then these west centric metanarratives alongside the development of western science and Cartesian rationality have then been imposed on other people around the world and they have now been internalized in modernity. From Mignolo then western dominance finds its power from its epistemic functions and knowledge itself is colonized and subaltern cultures and their ways of knowing are rendered inferior if and when they do not follow this epistemology of the zero point. A very recent example of Putin's use of similar logic of argumentation and critique took place in November when he spoke at an artificial intelligence conference in Moscow. Putin talked about how some western search engines operate selectively and with bias how the dominant western algorithms may imply that Russia with Russian culture science music and literature simply does not exist. This kind of xenophobia says Putin can arise even in artificial intelligence if it's created according to certain western standards and Putin himself proposes that domestic AI models should be created that reflect the richness of world culture heritage and the wisdom of all civilization. So similar kinds of tools are used by Putin as the colonial philosophers. Second concept sovereign democracy. Putin's view is that while democracy is a universal principle its meaning varies across diverse cultures and societies and the meaning is shaped by each country's and cultures' unique histories and traditions. And this perspective paints a picture of western nations intruding into the domestic affairs propagating their values through self-interest and imperialism as they try to promote democratic development in other societies. And this also makes this position Russia as a defender of some sort of authentic universally applicable democratic principles and makes Russia seem to be this kind of leading global counter-revolution against western hegemonic notions of democracy and multi-polar world. So this narrative that sovereign democracy creates closely aligns with the goals of decolonial theorists who seek to reveal the western origins of democracy and liberate the concept from western hegemony and embrace plurality or plurality as Mignola would say it. So they argue that the west, decolonial philosophers argue that the west insists on a universal understanding of democracy that can be measured and practiced according to some said criteria but only by respecting each culture's distinct way to achieve democracy can a truly pluriversal and democratic order emerge, say the decolonial thinkers. Finally, the concept of unipolarity. We often use the concept of unipolarity as a sort of state-centric concept through which the internationalist perceived to be this anarchical zero-sum playground where power begs to be balanced and great powers pursue their selfish national interest. Cold war was bipolar and then there's the unipolar moment and it's kind of scholars like to use concepts like multiplex or multipolar nowadays to describe the contemporary international order but even these concepts have different meanings based on who uses them. And scholars of Russian foreign policy have a tendency to claim that Moscow's worldview is largely informed by this sort of paranoid, neo-realist interpretation of the nature of international politics and U.S. foreign policy in particular. And for good reason the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs even tweeted John Mirsheimer's infamous 2014 foreign affairs article why the Ukraine crisis is the West fault. This was on February 28, 2022 and the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs wrote on the Twitter page that the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement. But I would say that this kind of realist interpretation of the Kremlin's worldview and critique of the West is only one side of the coin. On a closer examination I would argue that it's their use of the concept of unipolarity is a bitter cocktail of both realist and decolonial thought. As used by Putin, unipolarity denotes a view of the post-Cold War international order as a self-interested imperial project by the United States that has unilaterally imposed Western political and economic standards on other countries and dominates them. This is a situation which has, according to Putin, nothing in common with democracy. Through the concept of unipolarity, Putin is able to seize a subaltern subject position for Russia, rendering Russia into this revolutionary force against fighting against U.S. imperialism, like the other concepts as well. This is a decolonial and critical move. Putin's use of the concept resonates with finance tools of critique in the wretched of the Earth, such as changing subject positions in which the West becomes this colonial object of history and the colonized become these empowered subjects. And in these narratives, West is often portrayed as the civilizer and the hallmark of progress and development and the rest are portrayed as passive receivers waiting to be modernized. These tables are turned in Putin's use of the term unipolarity. So rather than being a sort of neutral social scientific concept that describes this thing called the international system, in Putin's usage, I would argue that the concept has some deeper meanings attached to it. And this narrative creates, like, traditional values of sovereign democracy, cast Russia as this revolutionary force fighting against U.S. imperialism. So Putin's tools, Putin, the tools of decolonial critique are present in these foreign policy discourses and I would argue in quite an interesting way. They're used to justify centralization of power in Russia. They're used to justify the war in Ukraine. And they're used to limit the rights of sexual minorities. And this is a challenge for critical international relations. Critical theories and tools often thought to be used for progressive emancipatory agendas to make the world a better place for the marginalized are used very skillfully by reactionaries such as Putin. Some might argue that Putin is not a decolonial ally because he's not genuine or because he uses decolonial rhetoric and concepts to justify imperialist expansion and colonial dominance of Russia's near abroad and anti-democratic policies at home. I agree that Putin is not necessarily a decolonial ally but it does not mean that his critique of international order is not decolonial. Indeed, Putin's use of critique could very well make him the most influential and impactful critical theorist of our era exactly because of the way he uses and mobilizes decolonial theory. He also has the biggest audience and those narratives, while they do not resonate in Western mainstream discourses, they might work in the global south and they also serve a function in Russia as well and among the far right in the West. So we're coming towards the end. My paper argues that while critical IR has so far largely neglected this darker side of critique it is perhaps the only theoretical tradition that can fully understand it. Critical IR theory needs to gather its deconstructive methods and tools and direct its attention to the problem posed by reactionary internationalists. So against the disciplinary background that I laid out earlier, engaging Putin's and other reactionary internationalists as a critique of international order is an opportunity for critical IR and it provides it with a new sense of purpose. My proposal is that Robert Cox's famous 1981 dichotomy of critical versus problem solving theory has done more harm than good and that it's time for critical IR to reinvent itself as a critical problem solving theory. What should be clear and I'll finish now is that decolonial critical theory is not always good or progressive. It can be dark, it can be reactionary, it can be nationalist, it can be violent and used for a wide variety of agendas. Just because we don't like Putin does not mean that his critique of international order is not decolonial. The subaltern is speaking just not the way we want it to. It is saying and doing some nasty things. Thank you very much. And with that, Rihanna, your comments. Great, you know, one of my favourite papers, I think it's great. I think it's very kind of diagnostic of the way in which the discipline implies its own teleologies, so we think that criticality somehow has an inbuilt politics, like it must be progressive and we get to define what progression is and about how that's not necessarily true. And kind of about the worlds that we imagine and how other worlds are being imagined with the same methods. And how we come to terms with that because we can't presume the politics of our methods, right? Because our methods are perhaps specific to a particular kind of political world-building or to a particular political world, but it doesn't mean that they're improper to other world-building. And we have to be very clear about that because if we do think and I think a lot of decolonial theorists would say that their methods are improper to Putin's world-building, you have to tell us why, because otherwise there's not a lot of value in that, I don't think. And so it kind of takes us back to this idea of like an inherent coherent critical politics, which I don't think necessarily exists and which has, as you say, kind of created this and has an excess, this like critical identity which doesn't necessarily align with critique. So I think there's critique as a practice and there's critical as an identity. I think there are two different things. I think you're going back with this paper, which is why I love it. Back to what critique does, right? It goes, here is a taken for granted orthodoxy, which here is decolonial thought, which I think it's fair to say struggles to hear critique sometimes. And you're going, right, I'm going to take it seriously on its own terms, the same way that I think I've written down here. Orientalism and Orientalism have reversed us and also the poverty of neorealism, so like to, I think, of the great political critiques of our time, or like theoretical critiques I suppose. The way that you read, and I think you have to read, with these people and then say, actually you're wrong, right, because of these things that are within your own text. It's not from a political positionality, it's from a kind of scholarly positionality. Does that make sense? I don't know if that's a valid division. But I think we have to view this crisis of critique as like productive and essential and invigorating because otherwise we are stuck with critique or critical IR that reproduces its own homogenising narratives, right? So Orientalism produces a particular subject that cannot be challenged and then to critique that is to say, actually the world is much more interesting than that and we as IR scholars should be invested in it and to be invested in the world is to see that sometimes it's a bit weird and sometimes it doesn't do the things you want it to do and that means that you get to write fun papers like this where you actually say something about what is happening rather than constructing a world that doesn't exist which I think is kind of speaks exactly to your point about Robert Cox's false question and how the future of IR which I guess we now have to become somehow has to move away from what it is now and where it's stuck and I think that this paper is like to me the beginning of a brilliant career and I'm very happy to like to speak to it and I will not be reading it I'm only going to have to end it but let's open up to questions I love the paper and I thought that it might be worth highlighting that the stakes are not just scholarly for IR let's not be provincial it might be worth looking at ANSA one of the Middle Eastern English language and French language news agencies and Canal Sur in particular and Jeanne Afrique in North Africa some of them are co-sponsored like Canal Sur in Venezuela by Russia today so they mirror a lot of the discourse but it might be worth seeing how it's working Putin is a colonial anti-colonial hero and he has managed to pick up a very specific strand of 1960s and 70s communists anti-American, anti-gringos in Latin America anything anti-gringo will get you that level of a probium and it is worth I think analysing how Putin this strategy is working I mean look at the Malian regime it's passionate about Russia's support for its final independence against the French that's how the new Malian president put it that's incredible and it sets the stakes even higher than just an academic debate I think but rather a debate about understanding how the reactionary international is able to pick from its polar opposites it's not the first time they managed to steal from Antonio Gramsci and that's incredible if they can do that they can steal from the decolonials and anyone else that's a good suggestion I'll take that on board I think it's very challenging in a single paper go through the deep sort of philosophical side and then at the same time analyse how it's working in practice so that's definitely probably a spin-off article idea there so thanks very much and also part of the critical problem-solving theory I just wonder whether it may be worthwhile also looking at the Russian intellectual origins of what underlies and depends what you described as the colonial critique of the Russian regime and much of what you said was already stipulated in the famous influential essay of Trubenskoy Russian humanity in the early 1930s that's the Eurasianist theory which is a strong theory of Eurocentrism, colonialism, etc and as we know these people, these networks, these think tanks individual figures who actually write Putin's speeches are well steeped into Eurasianist theory so are you going also to look not only in Gandhi but Russian Eurasianism and that sort of blending of orthodoxy autocracy, you know all these elements which again are re-blended in this powerful new fusion that you described and then had a global impact which you also described so is it worth looking also in these Russian traditions of the 20s and the 30s? Thank you very much, yeah in my paper I focus on in sovereign democracy I focus on Surkov's conception of sovereign democracy I don't go that deep into the intellectual tradition but definitely something very interesting that I'll be I'll take on and with regards to traditional values I go back to Naroshnitskaya's conceptions and unipolarity is interesting as well because it's a modern sort of social scientific concept so definitely you should thicken those traditions further, thank you very much Jean Verbrek has summarised some of these traditions for you, I think who is going to look at some of these Thank you Any other questions? Mati, does it make a difference that Russia has a history of critical theory in practice such as the Marxist tradition or does it tell us something about the hierarchies of critical approaches and how they have been picked and chosen by current imperialists? Yeah, that's interesting I think that the way those are used certainly it's always like the aim is to boost Russia's great power identity and great power standing and now it's trying to find new narratives and new concepts to make that happen where during the Cold War it came from communism and that tradition of critical theory I guess but now it's, now they're looking into new traditions and where to derive those narratives. It might be coming back at Marx that he hasn't been focusing on gender. Anyways. Thank you so much. We often discussed about Russia and their approach I'm wondering because I include the theory what I want to ask now in my research theories of geopolitics how I mean it was not in the Soviet time this widely studied in Russia but right now it became quiet interesting if we see how they intensified talking about theories of heartland also remland, sea power and so on do you think you also can see those approach as well because when we are talking about why Russia is behave how they behave today we need to find out the reason because they have their view so I main thing for my studies democracy but I want to also see how Russia considers this democratic development in Eastern Europe they consider it as a western tool against their power so I think we need to find out how they use those theoretical tools against the west and we need to find also some kind of solution this way too thank you so much what you said about combination of realist tradition geopolitics and then those are connected to decolonial critiques very interesting I would say that and in the paper actually go in little not too much detail but I just briefly discuss about how decolonial thought then merges with realist thought especially near realist thought but definitely those going back to Mahan and and all these classical geopolitics thinkers of the early 20th century would be interesting to see how those are connected to the debate and I think Pablo has already written something about this congratulations on your paper I would like to do two quick questions the first of them is like what's the impact and the relevance of some of the theory about civilizations within Putin's discourse and why that's question in my opinion important because although some of Putin's speech seems as a decolonial critique the weight that they issue about distant civilizations that has cultures rooted issues that makes them different between them and that must be respected in that perspective probably has a huge impact more than the issue of the colonial critique which is really related to another concept which is emancipation and honestly I cannot see how Putin's discourse is related directly for the idea of emancipation especially if we compare about how Putin's discourse nowadays compared to the ones of the Soviet Union when he tried to address Latin American countries and African countries during the process of independence for example and the second issue is how do you for example address the issue related to discourse in the reality as in fact as okay if Putin does use a decolonial discourse in order to gain attention and support internationally but how the West misses to address real agendas from the third world or the undevelopment world in the sense that Putin's kind of highlights being a great power and how with that he gains leverage in his discourse although we know he acts as a great power in his new broad thank you thanks so what I gathered from what you just said is you asked about Huntington class of civilization and how that relates to this civilizationism in Russian foreign policy I think it's not the same as Huntington's Huntington is in my view more of an extension of neorealism into civilization so it treats very polemically civilizations as these sort of unitary actors somehow there would be no transnational networks nothing so I don't think it's Huntingtonian discourse the one in Russia it's because in principle I think the way Putin uses these civilizational ideas is more it respects different kinds of religious traditions different kinds of cultural traditions so it's not so deeply Huntingtonian in that sense but with regards to the emancipation I believe there is an emancipatory vision in Putin's critique it's the multipolar order which is based on this sort of utopian dream world of nationalist nationalist and reactionary countries so and they would then live happily ever after and every nation would be thrilled to maintain its own identity and its own uniqueness so I think that's the emancipatory vision of Putin's multipolar order yeah I'll leave it at that did you have something to say I saw you were writing oh just giving me ideas for the chapters I think it's very much this question the way emancipation always is being within which you become emancipated and these two emancipated communities are allowed to be different but within that emancipated community you must be homogenous and that's obviously to simplify but I think that is in general the productive line of the decolonial critique I think is one of I think it's not fair reading all of the scholars who think this idea of specificity that you talk about cultural specificity I don't know if you want to speak to the question about discourse and reality my answer to that would be very different discourse is a reality there's no question that the construction of a decolonial discourse as Putin is doing is not an action that is politics in itself and it may be that it doesn't align with what you think material interests are but that then is a difference to be explored and not one that flattens the contribution of discourse analysis I think because the reasons that these actions are able to be justified in this way that's really important like what is it about the international means that these these justifications work why are they allowed and it might be that you think that's there's a realist answer to that and the answer is discourse doesn't matter because states have set interests but who constructs those interests and how do we decide what those are so I think I personally my my instinct is that or not my instinct my belief is that discourse is reality but you know it may be that these actions have to be then the way in which they're justified through a kind of critical gymnastics is what's interesting I think right so how do you decide what the pre-defined actions of a kind of scholarly approach are I don't know if that's helpful but I one of the privileges of moderating moderating a debate is nobody raises their hand and I can ask my question Matty you start the paper as a diagnosis of critique of a crisis of critical approaches couldn't you read this as an impact study of the opposite so when you look at the colonial approaches as a critique of Western hypocrisy and the European centric politics of knowledge and how it has been influential but that doesn't resonate with the powerful object of the colonial critique but it does have resonance on Putin and so now you could basically argue it's in a policy impact case study sense it is actually demonstrating the success of the colonial arguments influencing policy discourse but unfortunately not where it would matter so it's a critical problem solving theory sufficient or do we maybe need to clarify the underlying effects and values of a decolonial critique or specifically I guess so like I said in the paper it's a challenge and an opportunity and I guess you can make the claim that decolonial theory has been a victim of its own success in this instance and definitely I think maybe the points that I make in my paper and what Rhiannon was actually smart enough to I wasn't smart enough to understand myself and you read my paper and gave me comments is that that decolonial theory doesn't necessarily have any moral content it's just the way I treat it is a set of tools and certain techniques and moves a method and those can have different kinds of those can take different kinds of ethical means okay we have an online audience thanks Matty sorry Mr. Talk but talking about how messages land globally with beyond the west, beyond Russia and its immediate allies if you were talking to a western policy maker trying to get their messages to land better with some of these sort of hedging states these countries that align differently based on their individual interests and might vote say in the UN General Assembly one way or another and depending on a whole host of reasons or just how compelling they find any given argument what do you think those sorts of people, those policy makers could take from your paper in terms of how they frame those sorts of arguments should they kind of try and beat Putin at his own game should they double down with a very different argument should they go somewhere in between what do you think thanks Tom yeah first off I think policy makers should pay more attention to the language they use I was in Munich at a NATO workshop recently and I was struck by how they used Southern Southern European NATO member states like to use the word NATO Southern flank so even that is I think an interesting term to describe the sort of security orders because that implies that there is a sort of security threat coming an imminent threat coming from its sort of southern flank and there's a war going on so I think those kinds of the concepts are that we use in political debates they really matter because they are received in your sort of they are received differently by different audiences and I think that requires us to be more mindful of how those kinds of messages resonate in those concepts like you said and perhaps one of the ways is to sort of challenge this kind of idea that for example international relations theory is kind of sort of objective scientific way of studying internationalism there's no objective or neutral concepts and the most dominant concepts we use are often very realist or neorealist and these are often masqueraders or somehow scientific although they are very much largely a product of the United States political science in 50s and 60s and 70s and so definitely that's something to bear in mind I think yeah I don't know what you think yourself you're working on this issue um yeah I'm undecided actually I think I think there's one argument which says there's one argument which says that by engaging with some of the arguments Putin makes we're playing sort of to his advantage and then there's another argument which says that well many of these the reason many of these states identify with some of and sort of yeah identify with some of these arguments he's making and they they sort of have such weight with them is that they are they've experienced colonial violence some very extreme themselves and they naturally can sort of see the appeal of some of the the arguments he's using even if even if the physical manifestation is perhaps one that they might not immediately approve of um I'm not I'm genuinely not sure um I think we we in the West generally we kind of leap between the two we sometimes we sometimes say no no that's complete nonsense and then other times we sort of give it give it some credit and adjust our behaviour and I don't know if we do that in a coherent or kind of thought out way I think it's a bit ad hoc thanks just to jump on that I think there seems to be a bit of like a business model element to this because as Pablo said you know Russian authoritarian states can fund state media and co-fund media whereas there's a bit of a void especially in the global south like in Africa where there's just simply not enough investment in local media to higher quality journalists to you know so often you have these um kind of copy outlets that simply just syndicate copy and paste stuff straight from Sputnik and Russia today and it is you know interesting to see how especially in the Sahal areas like Mali with the French and the US presence diminishing how you know China and Russia are more than happy to fill that space and definitely position themselves as well you know we didn't colonise many countries in Africa so they can almost position themselves as an ally so I think there's maybe a case there for kind of investment and maybe more on the commercial side not theoretical but you know what role and responsibility do media buyers have could even argue like Google and some of the tech companies and then I was also just wondering you know a lot of leaders I can look at South Africa for example in the ruling ANC were trained by the Soviets so they almost have that you know theoretical thought that's how they learned and Bricks was recently hosted in Johannesburg and there's a lot of discussion about Bricks expansion and I guess this kind of falls into what you're talking about this more multipolar world and I was just wondering have you looked into kind of Africa and the global south and just around those kind of topics what I can say what I've been reading into recently is how in sort of Russian intellectual traditions what's the understanding of war and what is the Russian way of war especially when it comes to information and knowledge and I of the opinion that maybe in the west there's any inside NATO and military planners and decision makers there's this idea that war is very conventional traditional militaries against militaries but then if you look into Russian traditions of strategic thought like Mezner and others and there's this more sort of a whole it's a completely different kind of understanding of what war is it's a war where your soldiers on the ground in the battlefield and the only troops the troops are your enemies social movements and social forces and you try to insert ideas into those societies that then create the revolution from within so these kinds of conceptions are certainly even I think he uses those ideas as well and a bunch of other Russian military thinkers as well so I think that's something maybe to think about as well is that should we kind of try to think war differently and that way we can sort of start when we start asking the right questions and we kind of come up with proper answers so it's kind of questions kind of opinion but what do you think does the West need to change the policy towards what I mean the situation what we have today and we know after the Cold War how the West we are kind of and relaxed and sort of main problem main enemies is not there anymore and now it's time for peace but on the other hand as I've seen for my research Russia constantly have been working and preparing what we have today but thanks corruption in Russia they are not well prepared otherwise maybe we would have their tanks in London, in Berlin and many western European states and I agree when we see Russian propaganda they are very coherent they know what they are doing what messages they need to send and on the other hand in the West which I much appreciate because it's a democracy and it's very important to discuss and have a different opinion in the academia in media and many different places but actually it's makes very very confusion many people and one of the survey which was for example made in Ukraine Eastern Ukraine when they studied why they support Russian narratives actually they found out like because they give very direct opinion and very clear ideas what Russia's want to do and they don't have any debates in for example in the studio in talk shows and so on it's kind of work like that people believe what they listen and on the other hand Ukrainians when they were asked the same questions they could not answer what actually their thought was because mainly they are confused because I know we have a debate about the problems you have one opinion another and another and they can't come up especially people who don't have enough education and can't analyze so we have this kind of problem today from my point of view education is main important tool for the future long term for long term approach but right now we have the real problem it's very great to discuss about these theories analyzing what these theories are talking about but reality is completely different and very dangerous by the way so what do you think what we need to do in the west to give clear ideas for not just people in so called third world but even in western societies because I'm quite sure many people in western European countries are mainly confused even when you ask what this war means for you in Ukraine they don't consider this war as a threats from our democracy in the west because they think it's somewhere nothing to do for us but I think people who don't have an idea how democracy how hard it is to destroy democracy it's very and they also don't have an idea how easy it is to destroy it I think they can't understand what kind of dangerous situation we face today thank you thanks I would say my paper looks into how as part of that broader conflict how Putin criticizes the west and communication tools strategic narratives are very very effective not only in Russia but in the west among the new right and some fringes of the left as well and I think it's very interesting to see how that also impacts in the UN General Assembly and how Putin has been able to create this war or frame this war globally as a sort of very parochial conflict in the west as well and that doesn't very much interest it doesn't have that much interest globally and that you can see when you look at different African countries' responses to the war and they even some of them even support it and see it as a sort of decolonizing effort or de-westernizing effort to change the international order but yeah like you said and what you're doing in your PhD research is very important work but we have very different research questions and research interest of course we need to study these things if you also want to well me again I'd like to do another two questions if it's possible and to thank you for the excellent debate the first of them based on what you said is would you consider Russian traditional theories as the colonial that would be the first question based on what you answered and departing from the our colleague question here about Russian warfare and thinking well what you described about the Russian way of warfare doesn't the US does the same because what you all described is what we call like the combination of the national instruments of power time like diplomatic information and the military also in order to achieve political effects in that way the US does the same thing and sometimes for good for example I'm from Brazil last year we had elections and the US discourse about not accepting the military's role or disruption of democracy there was really important for the stabilization of the democratic process that well so that's a medal for the nation well in that sense what's the difference in terms of the practice related to the use of broader power instruments to create political intended objectives thank you thanks those are excellent questions with regards to the first one on Eurasianism whether I think it's decolonial I would say that in those discourses and how I also understand what decolonial means and how it has those three characteristics it can be void of any normative or ethical content if it has something meaningful to say about western dominance and western colonization of other cultures and other nations if it has something meaningful to say about indigenous traditions and the indigenous cultures and if it has something meaningful to say about emancipatory order or a new sort of roadmap for an emancipatory future then it's decolonial you can assess decoloniality of Eurasianism through that lens with regards to the Russian way of war and whether it links to also or it's very similar to western instruments of warfare economic information that's very interesting and that's a good point I would say that based on my reading a colleague in the department actually offered a book on Russian hybrid warfare it was very important to my thinking in regards to the Russian way of war and how in the 2010s when I believe it was 2010s when NATO came up with this concept of strategic communications around the same time a similar parallel concept emerged in Russian military thinking which is information war and I think Friedman shows very well in that book how these are very different I guess in the western mind there is this idea that strategic communications is essentially propaganda and it's about it's about saying something it's about writing it's text whereas in maybe in Russian way of war information war which is the parallel concept it's more also about actions and how you can do something which creates a response in your enemy country which leads to certain kinds of political debates and creating the conditions that are suitable for your overall strategic aims and this is an example I believe for example in the way Russia's has been modernizing its Arctic military infrastructure in western think tank analysis of Russia in the Arctic there's this tendency to assume that Russia has this great power in the Arctic and it has been slowly and skillfully played everyone in the west while it has been modernizing its Arctic infrastructure and they these analysts talk about how there are new military bases and new air bases in the Arctic whereas in reality if you look at these developments it seems that these are just tiny airstrips with janitors building in them so these are kind of interesting ways of just by acting in somehow you can create this interesting response which makes Russia seem very scary and a great power in western analysis so I would say with regards to the Russian way of war and information war I think there are some subtle differences there those are worth exploring definitely for thank you for your talk I have to say I'm not entirely convinced but there are a couple of gaps which I would draw to your attention one of them is the whole issue of human rights and particularly treaty based human rights and I would argue that the apogee of human rights was the Helsinki vinyl act in 1975 which was partly used against Russia was not the only raison d'etre but was actually used against Russia and the Russians remember that and also the increasing marginalization of human rights through the doctrine of humanitarian intervention which is actually undermined human rights all over many of the countries you talk about have not only experienced colonialism with colonies but also have experienced post-colonial revolution including of course America's near abroad which has always been a near abroad since the monorail doctrine I'm arguably America's intervened more in its own near abroad than Russia has so there are these kind of gaps and then there's the other issue of globalization and it's uneven effect over the years including a rapid fall in commodity prices in the 70s and 80s which is partly being reversed but then there are other wars which taking place sanctions uneven imposition of sanctions no sanctions have ever been imposed on Israel for example the economic war which is taking shape with access to minerals part of the unknown war is over access to minerals and these are all factors which I think need a bit more attention right so your first point about human rights and treated based human rights this is exactly what I talk about in my paper and what I discussed earlier during my presentation is that how in Putin's critique of international order he uses this idea that human rights are universal principles but they take different meanings in different societies and that's his way of critiquing the West and labeling anything that the West does for example funding democratic movements in Russia as a national security threat because it's a violation of Russian sovereignty and it's sort of cultural integrity so I'm not really I'm not sure what you mean by gaps in your question and the second topic the humanitarian interventions and their responsibility to protect this is exactly also related to this question because in Putin's critique this is exactly what he does he says and rightfully so that these humanitarian for example in his Munich 2007 Munich Security Conference speech he talks about humanitarian interventions as a sort of neo-imperialist mask for dominating other countries this is exactly what Putin says as well and so I was quite surprised by your sort of pointing out the gaps because I'm not really I'm not really sure what you were referring to we have time to discuss afterwards we have two more questions on my list and then I would suggest after that we're going to close the list of questions not so much a question but I actually just wanted to add on from your comment on what you were saying about the information war so I just finished stratcom with Neville Bolt and and read Morphe's book the Hybrid Warfare it's really good and just as you were saying I think where you know in the West they like to see things in these kind of silo departments you know like Pentagon will deal with military things and the State Department will deal with foreign affairs and stuff like that comes back to our kind of Western linear thought we like to have predefined definitions and kind of you know think in rational terms whereas I think in the Russian thought they place a lot more emphasis on the context and the situation and kind of like why would you have predefined when you talk of strategy you know why would you have predefined goals when the context can change so much and I think that emphasis on information and you said it's not just text and words but actions ultimately knowing that the main target is the psychological and everything ends up being a psychological decision so that main target I guess information not being a passive medium but a strategic tool just wanted to add on that I agree and I suspect what I've been for my PhD research I've been trying to sort of pinpoint where did that sort of siloed Russian thinking where did that emerge from and I believe it's in American political science it's this interesting development that happened in the 50's and 60's with the behavioral revolution in the social sciences and how you think that the social world can be studied the same way as a natural sciences studies the human body for example or the laws of physics and I think there's something maybe went wrong though this is so ingrained in sort of Western thought and like I said earlier when I intended this workshop in Munich a couple weeks ago that I think was quite surprised it was the audience was a couple PhD students some young professionals and master's students across Europe the reading list was 15 foreign affairs articles it's a very narrow narrow scope of literature very narrow epistemic very narrow epistemic parameters of where you draw or you can debate from especially if you think that foreign affairs debates are mostly rooted in your realist thought or liberal internationalist or liberal institutionalist sort of theoretical underpinning so I think that's something that we need to think of where we what kind of sort of epistemologies and ontologies we subscribe to when we analyze the world and that's really important when it comes to Russian foreign policy as well you can't really change the tire of a car with a chainsaw you need proper tools to do that and you need to look at the context what kind of tools you use to analyze them and let's not forget that the history of the journal foreign affairs is quite pertinent in this case as well great presentation Matty it was good to hear more about this one so I just had two questions maybe the first is more of a point but I'm sure there's a question somewhere in there but it seems to me what you're doing and we've kind of chatted about this before that you're almost abstracting away from certain decolonial and critical thinkers to discern I guess the more generic features of what makes something decolonial if I'm reading this right so my thinking here is can we identify then say previous examples of reactionary or far right revolutionary decolonial projects right so I'm thinking here of like David Modadel's work on say this reactionary Berlin international during the 1930s does that also match this sort of scaffolding that you've created here and that I guess would be slightly anachronistic right because that would be obviously prior to the advent a lot of this thought but then to bring this more towards your project itself I'm wondering also if we can discern whether there are direct intellectual roots between say these decolonial thinkers and critical thinkers and say this Putinist project and again this is something we kind of chatted about previously where I think doing the jump from say think tanks to Putin is the tricky thing right obviously Putin's not going to be name dropping people or necessarily citing thinkers and the like but I wonder if and I'm not sure if you go into this in the paper itself but whether say going into the likes of Dugan or these Russian think tanks these people are citing and they do name drop if they are drawing on either critical thinkers and scholars say in the 1960s, 1970s or also when this discourse transfers into IR if they're also drawing on them because I can think of in the case of Dugan there is weird references that he makes for example to John Hobson not the imperialism one the younger living one right which is very interesting whether you can identify clear you know a reception history of sorts so I'm wondering if you also engage in that intellectual history component or if it's more you abstract away define this concept and then compare it in a sense so I'm sure there was a question in there yeah yeah maybe well this is Kyle and everyone he's a historian of the 1930s so he can he can probably you can answer your first question well but with regards to the second on the sort of methodology I'm I it's not very it's not thick sociologically I'm I'm not able to very strongly make make arguments that these are like okay Putin met with this person here or Putin read this text here or sides this person that's not the point the paper is more more conceptual whether there's sort of whether there's the tools of tools of decolonial critique are present in Putin's Putin's thought as well I do some sort of historical sociology as well and so that I can claim that these sort of like like I mentioned earlier Natalia Narochnitskaya former Russian diplomat and the conspiracy theorist later on and and then sort of go for was was so called the chief ideologue of the Kremlin in the early or mid 2000s and how these people's articles and books and thoughts are then sort of present also in Putin's discourse so this it's quite thin sociologically I'll give you that but my my key argument is more with regards to the decolonial tools of critique more generally rather than actual studying networks and sociology of knowledge so much but yeah that's a good point and the sociology aspect is more my PhD research is more on this sort of thicker sociological side of things but that's a that's a fair comment I'll take it there thank you so much we can continue the conversation in a more informal way before we do that let me thank the School of Security Studies EDI team for organizing this series of events notably Ellen Helms and Eleanor Russell who have been organizing behind the scenes I would like to thank all of you for your thoughtful contributions and most of all of course Rhiannon and Mattie so please join me in a round of applause thank you