Making Great Power Identities in Russia: An Ethnographic Discourse Analysis of Education at a Russian Elite University

This book examines how the discourse of a strong Russia makes geopolitical subjects at a Moscow elite university. In so doing, it provides an inside perspective on the education of the future Russian elites and thus, possibly, on the future directions of Russian foreign policy. Through the prism of poststructuralist discourse theory this study tries to think the production of geopolitical identities, applying the work of theorists like Foucault and Laclau and Mouffe. It finds that what is at the heart of Russian great power identities is a constitutive lack that makes for a fundamental ambiguity: articulations of a strong Russia are always intertwined with the imminent possibility of a weak Russia. Martin Müller is Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland Ausgezeichnet mit dem Klaus-Mehnert-Preis der Deutschen Gesellschaft fur Osteuropakunde (DGO) / awarded the Klaus-Mehnert-Prize of the German Association for Eastern European Studies (DGO) for the best research monograph.