Den «russiske sivilisasjonsstaten» og andre stormakter: Diskurs og ideologi i krigens tidsalder

Since 2012, civilizational rhetoric has formed a central part of the conceptual repertoire of the Kremlin. Russia is here described as a “unique civilization” and/or a multinational “state-civilization” or “civilizational state” (gosudarstvo-tsivilizatsiia). With the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, this kind of civilizationism (Brubaker, 2017) has become an even more dominant feature of Russia’s ideological posture, in a context where Russia has increasingly appealed to the non-Western world (the so-called global south) for support in its current war against Ukraine and conflict with the West. Meanwhile, a recent tendency in Russian civilizationism has been a pluralisation of the concept of “civilizational state” in terms of an application of it to other non-Western countries aspiring for greatpowerness: above all China and India, but also Iran and BRICS countries more generally. This article analyses texts by regime-supportive public intellectuals and academics from both before February 2022 and after, in order to discuss to what extent the civilizational discourse, which until recently was mainly about Russia, is now expanded to include other, non-Western “state-civilizations” in what is a discursive contestation of Western “hegemony” and “universalism,” and whether the result of this is a “map of social reality” (Clifford Geertz; Michael Freeden) that takes on the status of an ideology. The article is thus a contribution to the ongoing scholarly debate about ideologies and their importance in contemporary Russia.