Read more
'This is the first work to thoroughly examine the relevance and impact of the ideas of Carl Schmitt in contemporary Russia. Lewis convincingly argues that Putin's world view reflects some of Schmitt's categories, such as "identitarian democracy" and "great space" power projection beyond the nation-state. This is a valuable contribution both to the politics of comparative authoritarianism and the history of ideas in contemporary Russia.' Peter Rutland, Wesleyan University An innovative study of the transformation of Russian domestic politics and foreign policy under Vladimir Putin This book goes beyond current polemical debates to explain why Russia's post-Soviet political system developed into a new form of authoritarianism and how its foreign policy came to pose such a profound challenge to the West. The author analyses the Russian political system as a novel form of authoritarian political order, characterised by the consolidation of political and economic power around a sovereign leader and a willingness to take political decisions outside the law both at home and in international affairs. The book explores this political system by unpacking the ideological paradigm that underpins it, investigating the Russian understanding of key concepts such as sovereignty, democracy and political community. Through the dissection of a series of case studies - including Russia's legal system, the annexation of Crimea, and Russian policy in Syria - the author explains why these ideas matter in Russian domestic and foreign policy. David Lewis is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Exeter, UK. Cover image: Vladimir Putin in the Andreas-Saal, Kremlin, Moscow, 2007 (c) akg-images / Sputnik Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-5476-6 Barcode
List of contents
Preface
1: Authoritarianism, Ideology and Order
Understanding Russian Authoritarianism
Order, smuta and the Russian State
Russia as Weimar
Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Order
2: Carl Schmitt and Russian Conservatism
Carl Schmitt in Moscow
Schmitt in the Academy
Dugin, Schmitt, and Neo-Eurasianist thought
Remizov and the New Conservatives
Normalising Schmitt
3. Sovereignty and the Exception
The Centrality of Sovereignty
Sovereignty in International Affairs
Discursive sovereignty
Domestic Sovereignty: Deciding on the Exception
The Sovereign Leader
The Sovereign and the Court
Exception, Norms and 'Manual Control'
The Dual State
4: Democracy and the People
Putinism and Democracy
The Decline of Parliamentarianism
Constructing a Majority
A majority of values
5: Defining the Enemy
Russia and its enemies
Constructing the Enemy Discourse
The Enemy Within: The fifth column
Civil society and foreign agents
The End of Consensus
6: Dualism, Exceptionality and the Rule of Law
Law in Russia
Conceptualising dualism
Politicized justice
Mechanisms of exception
Prokuratura
Security services
Courts and judges
The exception becomes the norm
7: The Crimean Exception
Crimea: The sovereign decision
Legality as imperialism
Order and orientation
8: Großraum Thinking in Russian Foreign Policy
A World of Great Spaces
Russia's Spatial Crisis
Russia's Spatial Projects
Russia as Hegemonic Power
The Political Idea
Exclusion of Foreign Powers
The new Schmittians
9: Apocalypse Delayed: Katechontic Thinking in late Putinist Russia
Russian messianism
Russia as contemporary katechon
Katechontic thinking and the Syrian intervention
Conclusion
Bibliography
About the author
David G. Lewis is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics at the University of Exeter. He is the author of The Temptations of Tyranny in Central Asia (Hurst, 2008) and he has contributed articles to the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Cooperation and Conflict and Europe-Asia Studies, among others.
