Past event
Legitimising War: How the Putin Regime Justifies Military Aggression against Ukraine Bo Petersson, Malmö University
CRSCEES is pleased to invite you to the last seminar in our series, Politics on the Edge: Rupture / Transformation / Imagination.
Please join us for ‘Legitimising War: How the Putin Regime Justifies Military Aggression against Ukraine' with Bo Petersson, Malmö University.
“This paper examines the legitimizing discourses of the top-level officials published on Kremlin.ru and other official outputs before and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine launched on February 24, 2022. Through discourse analysis it looks into how the Putin regime's legitimation strategies have shifted, and to what extent there are continuities and changes with previous years. It studies how the efforts to legitimize the Putin regimes have been affected by the war, and how the propaganda has addressed the fact that the war, for a long time, has not been going very well for the Kremlin, as well as the fact that it during most of its the first year has not even been officially recognized as a war by the regime.
“Petersson argues that one analytically can differentiate between master myths and subordinate myths when it comes to the public narratives that have been used to undergird and legitimize Putin's long-lasting hold on power. His contention is that master myths (Russia's pre-determined great power status, the encirclement of Russia in a hostile World led by the West, and Russia as a phoenix) remain strong, whereas more subordinate myths as Putin as a man of resolute action and Putin as a benevolent ruler have started to crack.
“The paper discusses the extent to which the weakening of subordinate myths can impact on master myths, what impact this may have on political developments, to what extent legitimation by political myth can be replaced with political control through repression, and what the general implications of these shifts may be for Russia after Putin.”