New publication

24.03.2015

New book about Russia’s subaltern empire by Prof. V. Morozov

The book Russia’s Postcolonial Identity. A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World by Viacheslav Morozov, Professor of EU-Russia Studies at the Institute of Government and Politics, has been released by Palgrave Macmillan.

Russia’s Postcolonial Identity. A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World gives a comprehensive post-colonialist account of how Russia’s position in the international system has conditioned its domestic development, and how this in turn generated specific foreign policy outcomes for the country.

The author argues that while Russia’s worldview is overwhelmingly Eurocentric, its difference from the core European countries is also beyond doubt. This difference can be explained by uneven and combined development of global capitalism, in which Russia is integrated as a semi-peripheral nation. As a result, Russia has never been able to overcome economic and normative dependency on the West. This has given rise to a regime which claims to defend ‘genuine Russian values’, while in fact there is nothing behind this new traditionalism but a mirror-image negation of Western hegemony.

The monograph contributes to the existing literature by applying postcolonial theory to Russia and looking at it as a subaltern empire. It pushes postcolonial studies and constructivist International Relations towards an uneasy dialogue, which produces tensions and reveals multiple blind spots in both approaches.

For the publisher’s information about the book, see here

Further information: Professor Viacheslav Morozov, morozov[at]ut.ee