Although Russia's pivot to the Global South is widely acknowledged, little is known about how it tailors messaging to different audiences covered by this geographical label. More generally, despite extensive work on strategic narratives in international relations, little attention has been paid to how disinformation and propaganda are diversified and adapted across audiences. Identifying and understanding adaptation strategies is vital for alerting target audiences to how foreign actors seek to influence them. We address this dual gap by examining whether and how Russia adapts two revolutionary narratives challenging the liberal order - multipolarity and neocolonialism - to different audiences in the Global South. Using narrative analysis, we systematically examine content produced by six different regional editions of the Russian state-sponsored media outlets RT and Sputnik. The results show that Russia tailors the content of its revolutionary narratives across three audiences; international English-speaking audiences, French-speaking audiences, and Spanish-speaking audiences. The most pronounced differences emerge between Spanish-language editions targeting Latin America and French-language editions targeting Africa. We conclude by discussing how these patterns of adaptation may reflect both regional contexts and broader strategic objectives, highlighting the need to understand propaganda narratives not as globally uniform messages, but as repertoires of audience-specific appeals.
Uzbekistan's anti-corruption reforms since 2016 have focused overwhelmingly on bribery, producing new legislation, oversight institutions, and nearly five thousand prosecutions in 2024. Yet labour market access remains widely perceived as unfair, and the Corruption Perceptions Index score has declined for two consecutive years. This paper argues that the reform agenda has been less effective against nepotism than bribery. Drawing on original survey data (295 respondents, four waves, November 2025 - February 2026), I distinguish bribery and nepotism exposure and estimate their separate associations with perceived employment barriers. Logistic regression shows that perceived nepotistic exclusion is associated with a more than fivefold increase in the odds of reporting employment barriers (OR = 5.18, p < 0.001), while reported bribery exposure shows no detectable independent association (OR = 1.09, p = 0.845; bribery-only subgroup n = 28, limiting power for moderate effects). The result is robust across seven alternative specifications, and neither income nor education measurably moderates the nepotism association - consistent with patronage networks creating near-absolute barriers that individual resources cannot overcome. The paper develops a distinction between purchasable barriers (bribery) and network-closure barriers (nepotism), arguing each engages different forms of capital and demands distinct policy responses.
This study analyses the construction of geopolitical imaginaries using gendered and sexualized enemy images in Russian news media during the first 2 years of full-scale war against Ukraine. It demonstrates that such enmities are used to transpose high-level narratives of Russia's intervention in Ukraine and decoupling with the West onto familiar frameworks of the mundane everyday. A systematic qualitative content analysis of more than 200 news articles published in three major outlets from 2022 to 2023 identifies three framings: i) envisaging the morally degraded West and Ukraine, ii) rationalizing wartime isolation and understanding contested spaces, and iii) constructing wartime morality in Russia. Gender and sexual minorities (GSM) are depicted as morally objectionable threats to civil rights, public order, civilizational continuity, and universal moral truth. GSM enmity is used to construct imaginaries that present the West as immoral and impractical, Ukraine as a hostile vassal, and Russia as a benevolent traditionalist power. Results contribute to scholarship on gender and sexuality in geopolitics and narratives justifying Russian aggression against Ukraine and the translation of those narratives to domestic mass audiences through news media and entertainment, extending geopolitical conflict into everyday life.
Why do political activists who risked repression under authoritarian rule withdraw from politics after emigrating to democratic contexts? Drawing on 413 in-depth interviews with Russian wartime migrants conducted across 30 host countries, this article examines pathways to political disengagement among wartime & eacute;migr & eacute;s following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We show that emigration does not automatically enable continued political activism, even among previously committed dissenters. We find that resource pressures and logistical challenges alone rarely produce full withdrawal. Rather, disengagement occurs when such pressures are mediated by emotional attrition rooted in pre-migration burnout, disillusionment, and the trauma of war and displacement. Defying expectations, perceived risks of transnational repression shape caution and tactical adaptation do not directly drive demobilization. Chiefly, we identify a distinct normative pathway to disengagement: many Russian migrants frame political activism in exile as ethically questionable, invoking norms of guesthood, non-interference, and contested legitimacy as citizens of an aggressor state.
This article analyses the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) as an anti-abortion lobbyist in contemporary Russia and evaluates its influence on reproductive health policy between 2010 and 2024. While existing scholarship has emphasised the ROC's role in promoting traditional values and legitimising the conservative turn in Putin's Russia, this article reconceptualises the Church as a lobbying actor seeking concrete policy change. It asks through what mechanisms, and to what extent, the ROC has influenced abortion policy and situates the case within broader anti-gender mobilisation and religious opposition to reproductive rights. Drawing on process tracing and preference attainment analysis, this article shows that the ROC has influenced policy through privileged institutional access to state authorities and by balancing religious absolutism with political pragmatism. While the Church has failed to achieve its maximalist goal of banning abortion entirely or removing it from the public healthcare system, it has nonetheless been successful in undermining reproductive autonomy and endangering access to abortion in contemporary Russia.
This article examines how demand-side populism evolves under populist incumbency in an electoral autocracy. Focusing on Hungary between 2010 and 2025, it asks whether prolonged exposure to a governing populist regime leads to the erosion, consolidation, or redistribution of populist attitudes among voters. Drawing on two surveys, the study combines harmonised longitudinal indicators with a contemporary ideational populism scale to capture change and continuity in populist-aligned attitudes. The findings reveal a pattern best described as persistence with recomposition. While aggregate endorsement of three comparable populist-aligned items - cultural protectionism, sovereigntist "own path versus the West" orientation, and leader-centred representation - declines over time, broader people - elite antagonistic and anti-compromise predispositions remain widely available in 2025. Populist attitudes do not shift uniformly across the electorate; instead, they re-sort across partisan publics and dimensions. By 2025, populist attitudes are no longer confined to the governing camp but are also present within the largest opposition electorate, including a new mass opposition challenger, structured by perceived regime disadvantage. Overall, the Hungarian case shows that demand-side populism can persist under populist incumbency while becoming cross-bloc as opposition realignment renders regime change electorally plausible.
Anti-Westernism has become a defining feature of Russia's official discourse, shaping both its foreign policy and regime legitimation. Yet scholars disagree on when and how this orientation took shape. This article clarifies the concept of anti-Westernism and traces its evolution between 2000 and 2024. Anti-Westernism is conceptualized as a discursive stance comprising two dimensions: normative (values and identity) and geopolitical (international order and power). Drawing on a mixed-methods approach, this study argues that anti-Westernism became radicalized not only through the gradual accumulation of hostility, but through the convergence of these two logics that initially developed along different trajectories. In the early 2000s, liberal democratic and traditional values were presented as compatible; over time, they were reframed as mutually exclusive. Geopolitical narratives shifted in 2007-2008 from emphasizing European integration to articulating an anti-American stance. These two dimensions converged after the 2014 Euromaidan revolution and the annexation of Crimea, when Western democracy promotion was reinterpreted as a deliberate strategy to contain Russia. This convergence intensified hostility towards the "collective West" during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The empirical analysis demonstrates that the intensification of Russia's anti-Western discourse resulted from the interaction between incremental discursive shifts and critical political events.
Using newly collected data on the contemporary density of Orthodox organization in Post-Soviet Russia and the historical spatial distribution of Orthodox monasteries before the Russian Revolution, I show that a denser Church presence is associated with a higher approval rating for the current president and a larger share of votes cast for the government candidate (ruling party) in elections. Today, the Church is less able to attract new churchgoers. However, it does affect the political preferences of those who, regardless of their faith in God, self-identify as Orthodox. The potential channel is the growing media presence of the Church.
This article examines how distinct digital mobilisation mechanisms - top-down leadership-driven communication and bottom-up peer coordination - shaped the dynamics of the 2020 Belarusian protests. While digital media are often credited with enabling decentralised and leaderless mobilisation, this study highlights the continuing importance of centralised leadership in protest coordination under autocratic conditions. Drawing on original time-series data from Telegram activity across Belarusian regions, the analysis employs a vector autoregressive (VAR) model to assess how leader-led and horizontal digital mobilisation influenced protest intensity. The findings reveal a clear asymmetry: leader-generated content from central opposition channels, particularly NEXTA, consistently preceded and was strongly associated with increased protest mobilisation, whereas peer-driven chat activity showed weaker and more reactive effects. These results suggest that, even in digitally networked environments, charismatic and strategic leadership remains critical in sustaining protest momentum. The study contributes to broader debates on protest organisation in authoritarian regimes and advances our understanding of how digital platforms mediate both centralised and decentralised forms of collective action.
Intergenerational transmission processes shape political behaviour. However, it is unclear if parental party affiliation during communism is associated with children's voting behavior during the post-Soviet era. I use the case of post-Soviet elections in 2000, 2003, and 2004 in Russia to understand how family political party membership during the Soviet Union period is associated with children's voting and political behaviour after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Leveraging insights from the national representative survey, I find that parental membership in the Communist Party before 1991 is associated with greater voter turnout among young Russian adults. I further show that these relationships persist only if a respondent's family did not experience an economic shock (job loss or salary reduction) during economic instability in the 1990s. These results suggest the family's pivotal role in the reproduction of political behaviours in the post-Soviet Russia, a context distinguished by wide political and economic transformations.
This study examines patterns of governmental religious discrimination (GRD) against 182 religious minorities in 30 states and independent territories between 1990 and 2023 in the post-communist Eastern European and Central Asian (PCEECA) region using the Religion and State-Minorities round 4 (RASM4) dataset. Patterns of GRD and government religion policy in general transformed considerably during this period, following a shift from radical ideological secularism under communism to substantial economic, political, and social restructuring in the new post-Soviet space. We find several distinct patterns. First, although GRD rose over time, this was most pronounced in Orthodox majority states and those that were part of the Soviet Union. Second, minorities seen as foreign experience greater GRD than historically established groups. Finally, while multivariate analyses show that societal religious discrimination is an important predictor of GRD across the region, higher levels of government support for religion correlate with increasing GRD only in Orthodox-majority states. These analyses confirm the great extent to which patterns of GRD in the PCEECA region conform to those observed worldwide, while also demonstrating how social and political upheaval have characteristically exacerbated these trends.
Does state-led patriotic education effectively shape young people's political and moral values? Many regimes introduce state-sponsored civic and patriotic classes in schools and universities with the aim of influencing the younger generation's social and political orientations. Yet, it remains unclear whether such educational interventions are effective in influencing young people's political beliefs. To investigate this issue, we turn to the contemporary Russian context. This paper leverages a natural experiment conducted in Russia to achieve causal inference regarding the impact of state-led patriotic education on youth social and political values. Specifically, we exploit the introduction of a compulsory class, "Conversations About Important Things," implemented by Russian authorities in 2022 across public high schools. Utilizing data from an online survey of 410 current university students, we compare moral and political values between students who participated in the class (freshmen during the 2023-2024 academic year) and those who did not (earlier cohorts for whom the class was unavailable). Our findings underscore the effectiveness of the new curriculum: students exposed to the class demonstrate significantly stronger agreement with statements prioritizing political loyalty as a key national value compared to their peers who lacked such exposure.
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 triggered a historic wave of emigration, reshaping the landscape of Russian political opposition abroad. Thousands of wartime migrants and exiles have sought to contest the Kremlin's war and authoritarianism through transnational activism. Yet, as this special issue demonstrates, the relationship between exile and activism is deeply ambivalent. Rather than an automatic extension of dissent across borders, activism in exile is marked by complex tensions-between empowerment and despair, hope and burnout, solidarity and disengagement. Drawing on six contributions spanning diverse contexts and methods, the issue develops approaches to grasp the contradictions and a shared analytical framework built on three interrelated themes: ambivalent agency, deservingness, and fragmented solidarities. Together, the articles show how new Russian exile communities in Europe and beyond navigate moral economies of guilt and responsibility, struggle with internal divisions and contested narratives in receiving societies, and confront emotional and material constraints on political engagement. By tracing these dynamics across multiple sites of migrants' activism, this issue advances broader insights into the possibilities and limits of transnational mobilization against authoritarian regime in times of war.
The paper revisits the methodological and empirical challenges of studying language shift in Ukraine in the context of war and displacement. Previous research has often overlooked the complex linguistic landscape and evolving realities of Ukrainian society. Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2022 has further complicated the situation, triggering mass displacement and increasing the fluidity of the linguistic repertoires. Conventional survey methods face limitations in capturing these dynamics, struggling with sampling representativeness and growing sensitivities to questions of identity and language. We argue for a more nuanced approach that considers the specific experiences of minority groups and the emotional impact on respondents. This emphasizes the need for trauma-informed research strategies. The study highlights the importance of examining language shifts through patterns of language use across different domains and generational changes rather than relying solely on self-reported preferences or simple questions. By adopting a mixed-methods approach and a long-term perspective, researchers can better understand the multidirectional nature of language shifts and the diverse experiences of displaced populations. This study calls for a reconsideration of rigid macro-regional classifications and a greater focus on the fluid linguistic landscape shaped by war and displacement.
Focusing on the case of Kazakhstan, this article offers novel insights on & eacute;lite politics in post-personalist regime settings. By presenting an in-depth analysis of ruler-& eacute;lite relations in the post-Nazarbayev years (2019-2023), we highlight striking continuities with cadre management modalities consolidated in Kazakhstan during the long Nazarbayev era (1992-2019), suggesting that the replication of & eacute;lite management strategies is the direct consequence of authoritarian continuity beyond leadership change. Our findings address mainstream scholarly conversations on transitions out of personalist rule within and beyond post-Soviet Eurasia, while bringing new evidence to the ongoing debates on the nature of authoritarianism in post-Nazarbayev Kazakhstan.
This article presents the Russian Contentious Events Dataset (RCED), a comprehensive dataset of contentious events in Russia from 2010 to 2023. It addresses the challenge of collecting protest event analysis (PEA) data by using social media and natural language processing (NLP) models to automatically identify and analyze reports of such events. The article details a methodological workflow that includes event classification, named entity recognition, duplicate removal, and post-processing. Analysis of the generated dataset reveals longitudinal protest trends in Russia. Using summaries of the original tweets, the paper demonstrates how event classification and spatial clustering can be used to analyze contention at both federal and regional levels, identifying significant variations across the country. This study shows that modern machine learning and language models can automate and scale PEA, improving the data collection process while reducing resource requirements. The article contributes to the literature on the automation of protest data collection and emphasizes the need for further research into how advances in NLP can be applied in this field.
What role does international law play in Russian imperialism? Several scholarly works have demonstrated that Russia's position in the world order is defined both by its marginal status among other Great Powers and by its exceptional approach toward the post-Soviet states. Drawing on genealogical approaches, this article adds to these works by showing how international law enables Russia to maintain this dual position in the world order. It argues that the paradox inherent to international legalism - promising equality yet reproducing hierarchy - enables Russia to adopt a dual strategy. On one hand, it invokes a post-colonial narrative to critique Western violations of international law; on the other, it leverages the colonial foundations of the international legal system to assert dominance over other polities. Through an examination of Russia's legal justifications for the use of force in Syria and Ukraine, the article contends that contemporary Russia's legalistic imperialism seeks to construct a sense of equivalence with its imperial competitors. Yet these efforts are constrained by Russia's marginal position in the current rivalry between the US and China, as well as its normative dependence on the very same system it criticizes. The paper therefore adds to various literatures on Russia's role in international affairs.
In this article, I reflect on the challenges of conducting research on language in wartime Ukraine from the perspective of critical sociolinguistics. Situated within Ukraine's nation-building debates, the issue of language has been intensified by ongoing Russian aggression. Considering the ideological framing of language as both a marker of patriotism and a site of political contestation, I follow a critical ethnographic sociolinguistic approach that foregrounds language as a political, social, and economic resource, while also emphasizing the researcher's positionality. Drawing on my own research, which combines participant observation and biographical interviews, I demonstrate how wartime heightens symbolic and emotional investments in language. Theoretically, wartime language dynamics are underpinned by the concept of the linguistic repertoire, approached through interactional, poststructuralist, and phenomenological lenses. I advocate for methodological flexibility and trust-building techniques, and I approach the choice of interview language from a code-meshing perspective. By foregrounding language as fluid and socially embedded, this article contributes to rethinking ethnography in contexts of instability and war, suggesting that such conditions also reshape the epistemological frameworks of linguistic and social research.
