Marlène LARUELLE
Associate Research Fellow, Russia/NIS Center
Research Interests:
- Ideology and national identity issues in Russia and Central Asia
- Russian Arctic policy
Marlène Laruelle is Research Professor and Associate Director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at the George Washington University (Washington DC) and co-director of PONARS-Eurasia. She works on ideology and national identity issues in Russia and Central Asia, as well as on Russian Arctic policy. She has been Associate Research Fellow at Ifri’s Russia/NIS Center since January 2019.
Her last publications include La Russie entre peurs et défis (Armand Colin, 2016, with Jean Radvanyi), released in a revised and updated English version Understanding Russia. The Challenges of Transformation (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), and Russian Nationalism. Imaginaries, Doctrines, and Political Battlefields (Routledge, 2018).
This paper argues that Russia’s soft power should be understood as a niche soft power, microtargeting some specific audiences based on four particularisms:
Despite the deterioration of its relations with the West and economic stagnation limiting its room for maneuver, Russia continues to have an ambitious policy for the Arctic region.
Central Asia is conventionally seen as a conflicting space for great powers.
What makes the militia milieu so unique and important for understanding today’s Russia is that it finds itself at the intersection of state institutions, patronage mechanisms, criminal structures, and grassroots illiberal activism.
Like the proverbial cat, some concepts have several lives. Or, like the mythological phoenix, they can be reborn from the ashes. This is certainly the case of the Intermarium, a geopolitical concept that envisaged an alliance of countries reaching from the Baltic Sea over the Black Sea to the...
Of Russia’s 146 million citizens (if we include those in Crimea), 63 million—or 43 percent—are under 34 years of age. Of these, 30 million belong to Generation Y (millennials in their 20s and early 30s), 15 million belong to Gen Z (teenagers), and a further 18 million are part of the youngest...
This paper analyses the phenomenon of “Kadyrovism” as a relatively coherent ideology which possesses its own internal logic and propaganda tools and which reflects the reality of Ramzan Kadyrov’s rule, based on submission to Vladimir Putin while also being marked by provocative acts directed...