Publications of Kurowska, X.

What Does Russia Want in Cyber Diplomacy?

The standard analytical narratives regarding Russia’s behavior in global diplomacy, today, revolve around great power aspirations, revisionist power games, and a threat to liberal democracy as we know it. The Russian discourse can also, however, be parsed with reference to resentment, resulting from the sense of “being betrayed” by the West (Kurowska 2014), or to anger over apparent disrespect received from other international actors (Larson and Shevchenko 2014). Demand for status recognition is a key factor in Russia’s international conduct (Krickovic and Weber 2018; Schmitt forthcoming; Neumann 2016, 1996), which finds its expression in Russia’s regular insistence on acknowledging its indispensability to the international order (Lo 2015, 47). Despite declarations of pragmatism in foreign policy (Omelicheva 2016; Casier 2006), this status-related rationale often overshadows what would appear more rational courses of action. Demands for recognition may also result in embarrassment. One vivid example of the latter involved the emotional outburst by the acting Russian representative to the UN, Vladimir Safronkov, towards the UK representative during a Security Council session in April 2017: famously, “Look at me!” and “Don’t you dare insult Russia again!” (RFE 2017). Many looked away mortified, but Safronkov’s superiors in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs commended his behavior, as part of resistance towards Western attempts at hegemonic imposition (Schreck 2017).

Interpreting the uninterpretable: the ethics of opaqueness as an approach to moments of inscrutability in fieldwork

This paper develops what I call ‘the ethics of opaqueness’ as a response to conceptual impasses concerning the uninterpretability of intersubjective knowledge production in narrative practice. The ethics of opaqueness sees the other as inscrutable and radically heterogenous, and confronts interpretations of the other by the self as suspicious projections. Thus, such an ethics addresses the self, not the other, as the object of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion.’ In order to conceptualise the ethics of opaqueness, I look to relational psychoanalysis, which understands the unconscious as being inherently intersubjective. From this results a reformulation of the process of recognition, and deeper acknowledgment of countertransference—that is, the partly unconscious conflicts activated in the researcher through the research encounter, which may lead to imposing meaning on the other. The apparatus of relational psychoanalysis concretises the limits of knowing either the other or the self and supplies a vocabulary to crystallise the double quality of ‘uninterpretable moments’ in narrative practice: They may trigger an imposition of a frame and therefore an interpretive closure; however, they also supply a potentially transformative space for the contentious co-construction of meaning, often in the form of metaphors, which subverts any claim to interpretive mastery.

Rituals of World Politics: On (Visual) Practices Disordering Things

Rituals are customarily muted into predictable and boring routines aimed to stabilise social orders and limit conflict. As a result, their magic lure recedes into the background, and the unexpected, disruptive and disordered elements are downplayed. Our collaborative contribution counters this move by foregrounding rituals of world politics as social practices with notable disordering effects. The collective discussion recovers the disruptive work of a range of rituals designed to sustain the sovereign exercise of violence and war. We do so through engaging a series of ‘world pictures’ (Mitchell 2007). We show the worlding enacted in rituals such as colonial treatymaking, state commemoration, military/service dog training, cyber-security podcasts, algorithmically generated maps, the visit of Prince Harry to a joint NATO exercise and border ceremonies in India, respectively. We do so highlighting rituals’ immanent potential for disruption of existing orders, the fissures, failures and unforeseen repercussions. Reappraising the disordering role of ritual practices sheds light on the place of rituals in rearticulating the boundaries of the political. It emphasises the role of rituals in generating dissensus and re-divisions of the sensible rather than in imposing a consensus by policing the boundaries of the political, as Rancière might phrase it. Our images are essential to the account. They help disinterring the fundamentals and ambiguities of the current worldings of security, capturing the affective atmosphere of rituals.

Neutrollization: Industrialized trolling as a pro-Kremlin strategy of desecuritization

This article considers the significance of trolling for security processes through a contextual analysis of industrialized pro-Kremlin trolling in the Russian blogosphere. The publicity surrounding Russia’s hacking activities in international politics conceals the significance of the domestic trolling culture in Russia and its role in the ‘trolling turn’ in Russia’s foreign policy. We contextually identify the practice of ‘neutrollization’ – a type of localized desecuritization where the regime adopts trolling to prevent being cast as a societal security threat by civil society. Neutrollization relies on counterfeit internet activism, ostensibly originating from the citizenry, that produces political disengagement by breeding radical doubt in a manner that is non-securitizing. Rather than advocating a distinct political agenda, and in contrast to conventional understandings of the operations of propaganda, neutrollization precludes the very possibility of meaning, obviating the need to block the internet in an openly authoritarian manner. It operates by preventing perlocution – that is, the social consequences of the security speech act. This prevention is achieved through the breaking or disrupting of the context in which acts of securitization could possibly materialize, and is made possible by a condition of ‘politics without telos’ that is different from the varieties of depoliticization more familiar in Western societies.

Chiasmatic crossings: A reflexive revisit of a research encounter in European security

This article makes an argument about chiasmatic knowledge production that seeks to cut across the entrenched division between the subject and object of inquiry, on the one hand, and the narrative and normative authority of the scholar, on the other, that is inherent in most writing in international relations. We revisit our own research encounter in the field of European security to explore the premises and implications of fieldwork relationships between researchers and practitioners and show their potentially transformative effects. Classifying such engagements as acts of professional transgression by both sets of parties overlooks their promise to facilitate the understanding of security practice ‘from within’ and to provide for tangible scholarly and political criticality. It is argued that, in the restricted realm of security, extensive interaction with practitioners could be a proxy for participant observation. Yet, we look further than that. We develop a concept of ‘chiasmatic crossings’ that reflects and helps theorize the ideational give-and-take and conceptual ruptures in the process of co-authorship that are indicative of distinct trajectories in European security research. This challenges the knowledge claims and static positions of both ‘problem-solving’ and ‘critical’ scholars in the field.

'Solana Milieu' : Framing Security Policy

The aim of this article is to contribute to a better understanding of the process of security policy production at the Brussels level. Two points are made. First, it is shown that in order to grasp the logic of policy outcomes it is crucial to analyse the major actors in the field, the patterns of the interaction they forge and the notions that inform their political action. I single out an entity, which I call the Solana milieu, and illustrate how this environment has become a significant policy entrepreneur in the realm of EU's security policy. I propose that a dynamic approach to frame analysis is useful to unravel the modus operandi of this ambience. In particular, it offers a way beyond the oft-repeated criticism of policy incoherence whose elimination would allegedly bring a remedy to the under-performance in the EU's security policy. It argues instead that policy controversies are inevitable due to the institutional identities that are at play. Secondly, the investigation into one security-making field illustrates the inherent politicisation of the process, which nuances the argument about the inevitable shift away from 'normal politics' when security questions arise.