Russian Nation Building and the Biopolitics of Defending Tradition, 2012-2021

Abstract

Since the commencement of Putin’s third presidential period in 2012, Russian identity politics has variously been interpreted as an ‘ethnonationalist turn’, a ‘conservative turn’, and a ‘turn towards tradition’. A further turn towards authoritarianism at home has been coupled with attacks on Western secularism, multiculturalism and alleged moral decay. At the same time, official discourse has been increasingly preoccupied with defining and addressing problems related to citizens’ bodies. The government has increasingly been promoting ‘traditional values’ in spheres such as sexuality, health and family relations, while these spheres have discursively linking these spheres to national security. This thesis applies Foucault’s concepts of governmentality and biopolitics to the regime’s ‘turn to tradition’ and argues that Russia’s traditionalist body politics may be interpreted as a type of nationalism. The analysis draws on Foucault’s theorising of the relationship between biological life and modern politics and uses biopolitics as an epistemic category in the mapping of how Russia is discursively imagined as a community. The analysis explicates the mechanisms of this ‘bionationalism’: how and why this biopolitical discourse functions, legitimises problematic practices, renders political opponents as security threats, excludes ‘abnormals’, expands the state into the everyday lives of citizens, and marginalises – even securitises – alternative notions of national identity