Beyond the core. Conceptualising Russia's Hybrid Exceptionalism in times of war

Abstract

This chapter examines contemporary Russia’s self-positioning through the application of Hybrid Exceptionalism as its conceptual-analytical framework. As a special adaptation of Edward Saïd’s Orientalism to Russia’s hybridity, and its specific – exceptionalist – civilising missions, the concept reconciles claims to civilisational superiority by an ambiguously Western empire like Russia’s with its incorporation into, at best, the semi-periphery of International Society. Hybrid Exceptionalism is, accordingly, first approached as a series of eschatological claims inherent to Russia’s subsequent – Tsarist, Soviet, contemporary – manifestations, which place the country in a liminal civilisational space between ‘West’ and ‘East’. The chapter subsequently explores how these claims manifest themselves in the defining conflict of our age – Russia’s war on Ukraine – before considering the staying power of this unique hierarchical worldview. Prospects for Russia’s ‘decolonisation’ are considered in view of several differences from its Western imperial counterparts, as a simultaneous nation-state, multinational territorial empire, settler-colonial entity and nuclear great power. This divergence from Western colonial experience, it is claimed, inhibits moves towards decolonisation-as-disintegration, instead suggesting a need to actively transform Moscow’s contemporary form of exceptionalism into one more attuned to contemporary postcolonial realities.