Critique & Humanism | 45 | 2016 | The Protests as Civic Practice

This article examines the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi (2005-2012) – the hitherto largest youth organization since the Soviet-era Komsomol – in order to elucidate the background of changes that have appeared in the Kremlin’s symbolic politics since 2012. Nashi’s disappearance from Russia’s political scene by the summer of 2012 can be seen as an elementary part of the crisis that the Kremlin faced with the large scale protests that shook Russia’s major cities in the winter of 2011/2012. However, Nashi’s negative image did not fi rst appear in Russia with Putin’s decreased popularity and the beginning of the large-scale protests; rather, such a negative image has been manifested throughout the existence of pro-Kremlin youth formations supporting Putin’s political leadership, before and after Nashi. Rather than demonstrating a well-planned and calculated insistence on patriotism and moral conservatism, the history of the whole pro-Putin youth movement indicates that it has continuously struggled with its public image ever since its idol, President Putin, appeared in Russia’s political arena. By focusing on Nashi’s online writings as its major voice, the author exemplifi es the basic and unsolved dilemma of governmental mobilization – the tension between didactics and stimulation – that is crystallized in the movement’s political communication. After that, in a short excursion on Nashi’s successor, the project Set’, the author’s aim is to pinpoint how the ‘exit’ from Nashi’s communicative dilemma, in line with the Kremlin’s symbolic politics since 2012, appears as a proliferation of Putin’s personality.

Keywords: Russia, youth movements, Putin, discourse, Nashi, Set’

This article explores the role of students as actors during protests in Ukraine. It focuses primarily on the 2013-2014 Euromaidan revolution, but uses a broader historical context and comparison with the so-called Revolution on Granite in 1990 and the Orange Revolution in 2004. While it demonstrates that students were on the forefront of all three major upheavals, the article underlines the key differences between the three ‘revolutions’. The Euromaidan protests and the ensuing Revolution of Dignity are chronicled and subsequently analysed from the point of view of students’ actions. The article examines why students were not able to leave their mark, even though they had in fact spearheaded the protests. It points to the absence of a clear set of demands, the ambiguous role played by new social media, and the lack of organizational structures within the student movement. More so, the article concludes that though there were certainly similarities between Euromaidan and the other protest movements in the so-called global protest wave since 2008, it was foremost the experience of previous maidans that framed the protests in Ukraine.

Keywords: Ukraine, student movements, Maidan, Revolution on Granite, Orange Revolution, Euromaidan, Revolution of Dignity

This article aims to analyze the Bulgarian student occupations in 2013 in terms of two different rationalities – instrumental rationality and value rationality – which were referred to respectively by the opponents and the supporters of the protests in order to justify their account of them. The analysis elaborates a typology of the anti-protest rhetoric, distinguishing three main types: the first insisted on the opposition between ‘moral’ and ‘social’, and criticized the protests as being based on an ‘abstract’ and ‘hazy’ moralism; the second treated the protests as a direct or indirect expression of private interests; the third claimed the protests were just a means to a particular end, be it that of the oligarchy or of the protesters themselves. The final part of the article argues against these instrumentalist approaches to the protests of Bulgarian students and introduces another perspective, suggested by Albert Hirschman in his analysis of the meaning of collective public action. According to Hirschman, public action should not be evaluated on the basis of its immediate results, because its value consists in the very act of protesting which educates and constitutes citizens as a critical civic community.

Keywords: student occupations, instrumental rationality, value rationality, civic protests, public action.

On December 12, 2013, Liza Shaposhnik, a volunteer at Kyiv’s EuroMaidan, was interviewed by Radio Svoboda. “I came to Maidan to stand up for my rights”, she said. “The European Union is, for us, a chance to live well, to have a normal life”. This phrase, ‘to have a normal life’, was often invoked by EuroMaidan activists as they elaborated for me the broad goals they held for themselves and their country. This conscious push away from Soviet social paradigms towards a national community that embraces European values (and the ‘normal life’ these values are believed to engender) was a central tenet of the ‘declaration of dignity’ that the EuroMaidan protests embodied. During the protests, I was in Ukraine conducting research on the use of methadone maintenance therapy for chronic opiate users. In interviews with methadone patients, most of whom called themselves ‘addicts’, many portrayed their motivations for starting treatment in similar terms: they want to live like normal people. By comparing the social inclusion of Liza to the social exclusion of drug users at EuroMaidan, this is paper explores the discursive enactment of ‘dignity’ in Ukraine. By considering how and why some Ukrainians are integrated and afforded meaningful personhood in the Maidan, while others are de-humanized, stripped of subjectivity, and excluded from the new society that EuroMaidan represented, it follows these acts of boundary maintenance down to their ideological foundation, suggesting that the praxis of dignity post-Maidan Ukraine is not only a rejection of state corruption and violence, but also a potent form of bio-power, a social reckoning and policing of individuals’ inner psychological states.

Keywords: Ukraine, EuroMaidan, social distinction, drug use, addiction, subjectivity, personhood

This paper provides a fi rst empirical investigation and tentative political contextualization of one of the earliest and most important irregular paramilitary formations of post revolutionary Ukraine in 2014. It discusses the rise of the Ukrainian far right after 1991, and surveys briefly the emergence of volunteer battalions in 2014. It focuses on some of the exceptional traits in the prehistory and creation of the ‘Azov’ battalion founded by a group of neo-Nazi activists from the organization Social-National Assembly/Patriot of Ukraine. It details, in particular, some strange aspects of the cooperation between the ‘Azov’ founders and the political provocateur Dmytro Korchinskiy as well as the infamous populist Oleh Liashko. It characterizes ‘Azov’ as an altogether untypical volunteer unit in post-Maidan Ukraine in terms of the past and the ideology of its founders. However, the paper only touches upon some particularly intriguing issues in the emergence of this unit, and does not attempt to give an overall assessment of its nature as a political grouping as well as military foundation as it does not venture beyond the year 2014.

Keywords: Ukraine, Russia, irregular armed groups, far right, neo-Nazism, Ukrainian nationalism, Euromaidan, post-Soviet politics, Russian-Ukrainian war, radical right.

For several months in 2013-2014, thousands of Ukrainians and Bulgarians participated in anti-government protests. However, the outcomes could not be more different. The Bulgarian government politically survived #DANSwithme, while Euromaidan precipitated President Yanukovych’s fl ight from Ukraine in late February 2014. Why did #DANSwithme gradually dissipate, while Euromaidan escalated into the worst episode of political violence since Ukraine’s independence? We know that medium levels of repression applied inconsistently during protests can lead to radicalization and violence. But we do not know whether the judiciary’s behaviour before and during the protests could affect the likelihood of an escalation towards violence. This article proposes a complementary explanation of protest radicalization, which posits that recent, unambiguous, and effective use of a pliable judiciary by political incumbents to punish and undermine the opposition raises the odds that both sides will engage in violence. Politicized selective justice raises the stakes of victory both for the government and for the protesters, and reduces the possibility of a compromise. In Bulgaria, where the judiciary, albeit politicized, has not been effectively used to undermine political opponents, protesters perceived the government’s attempts to engage in legal persecution as a hassle and the chances of imprisonment as remote. Neither should the Oresharski government have expected to be prosecuted in the event of losing office. In Ukraine, by contrast, the judiciary had a clear recent track record of politicized selective justice both against protest participants and high-level politicians. Former PM Yuliya Tymoshenko and another Orange Revolution main actor and former minister of interior, Yuriy Lutsenko, served lengthy prison sentences. Consequently, both the leaders of the opposition and Yanukovych and his coterie probably expected that imprisonment would be inevitable if they did not come out as winners of the Euromaidan standoff.

Keywords: anti-government protests, politicized justice, protest radicalization, prosecution of corruption, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Euromaidan

With the new frozen confl ict in the separatist region of Donbas, the popular discourse about Ukraine as a ‘divided nation’ looks like a self-fulfilling prophecy. This discourse juxtaposes the Ukrainian-speaking pro-European west and the pro-Russian, Soviet nostalgic east as two historical and cultural entities, informed by confl icting collective memories and antagonistic identities, that have little chance of coexisting peacefully as a united country. The armed confl ict in the east of the country appears now as a logical outcome of this deep cultural and political division of the Ukrainian nation. This article attempts to break the vicious circle of Ukrainian debates on national identity and seeks to reconsider the role of identity politics in the current Ukrainian crisis. It shows how Ukraine’s divided political elite has used identity politics as a tool for mass mobilization, and how Russia has profi ted from the ‘war of identities’ in its efforts to prevent the country’s orientation to Europe. The article also outlines the main shifts in collective identities after Maidan and the annexation of Crimea, and the dilemmas of a new identity politics.

Keywords: Ukraine, Russia, Euromaidan, ‘Russian world’, identity politics, civic nationalism, reconciliation

The article outlines the politics of memory towards the Soviet past in Ukraine in 1991 2015 and shows the origins of present-day ideological debates, political decisions and historiographic controversies. Two competing historical narratives – nationalistic and late (neo)Soviet – co-exist in popular perceptions and state politics of history in Ukraine. Both of them are eagerly instrumentalized by politicians throughout the post-Soviet period of one of the most diverse, pluralistic and ambivalent countries in Eastern Europe. The Euromaidan, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbass region actualized the problems in the attitude towards the complex Soviet past of Ukraine. The victimhood narrative, the removal of Lenin statues, the adoption of the so called ‘decommunisation’ laws and the prohibition of the Communist Party in Ukraine posed numerous questions about the limits of state’s interference into memory and history issues, the correlation between anti-Soviet and anti-Russian political claims, and the future of the regional diversity of Ukraine. The author argues that Ukraine’s diversity does not imply its underdevelopment or a hopeless division into ‘Russian’ and ‘Ukrainian’ parts. He shows also that the ‘Soviet’ label serves as the foremost ‘Other’ in the post-Maidan mainstream political discourse.

Keywords: Ukraine, communism, Soviet past, Second World War, memory, decommunisation

This article concentrates on the phenomenon of Russophilia in Greece and situates it within the context of national populism. Numerous political analysts and journalists have not examined Russophilia in Greece as a component of a national populism which cuts across the traditional ‘left-right’ spectrum. This research is very topical at a time when Russia is emerging as a competitor to the EU and the Kremlin is searching for political allies throughout Central and Southeast Europe. This study demonstrates that the foundations of public Russophilia in Greece are feebler than many external commentators tend to estimate. A rather ahistorical and almost ‘Messianic’ notion of Russophilia interweaves with national populism in the light of the dispute with the EU and Germany over the management of the economic crisis.

Keywords: political culture, populism, nationalism, Greece, Russia

Today once again we should treat Russia as a black box. This is argued on the basis of the author’s personal encounters in Moscow and explained through a text by Ivan Ilyin. The roots of Russia’s return to political realism in foreign affairs are traced back to War and Peace by Tolstoy. An attempt is made to turn Blackbox Russia into a white box by analyzing the development of the Russian elite since the beginning of modern education, and tensions between the intelligentsia and the civil servants in the last two centuries. Russia’s perspectives to produce better governance in the near future are evaluated.

Keywords: black box, elite, intelligentsia, political realism, Russia, white box

The paper explains the motivations behind radical Islamism and the recruitment to engage in jihadist terrorism. More precisely, it outlines the common patterns which define the process of Islamic radicalization in western European societies. The paper argues that Islamic radicalization must be understood as an individual phenomenon and not a problem afflicting Muslim communities more systemically. Moreover, the phenomenon is distinctly youthful in form. In sum, the paper demonstrates that radicalization is a youth revolt against society articulated on an Islamic religious narrative of jihad. It is not the uprising of a Muslim community victim of poverty and racism: only young people join, including converts who did not share the ‘sufferings’ of Muslims in Europe. These rebels without a cause find in jihad a ‘noble’ and global cause, and are consequently instrumentalized by a radical organization (Al Qaeda, ISIS) that has a strategic agenda. The paper concludes by outlining a general strategy to counter radicalization and the recruitment for jihadi terrorism. The priority, beyond building a more sophisticated intelligence system, is to debunk the narrative of heroism, to break the ‘success story’ of ISIS as being invincible (including on the ground) and to let Islam in Europe appear as a ‘normal’ religion. The aim is to accentuate the estrangement of radicals from the Muslim population and to dry up the narrative of Islam as the religion of the oppressed.

Keywords: Islam, jihad, terrorism, radicalization, revolt, youth culture, Salafism

This article is an attempt at a sociological reconstruction of the refugee’s social situation – the radical historical metamorphosis of the figure of the ‘stranger’ in the 20th century. The analysis focuses on the figure of the refugee аs an absolute form of alienation (as a result of exclusion) from the social world. The first step reproduces the key moments of Georg Simmel’s study on the “sociological form of the stranger as a synthesis between remoteness and closeness”. The second step traces out the constitutive elements in Alfred Schutz’s conception of “the stranger as an adult individual of our time and civilization, who tries to be permanently accepted or at least tolerated by a group which he approaches”. The third step, through the analytical strategies of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, represents an endeavor to restore the historical conditions of possibility of the figure of the refugee: as a ‘boundary-concept’ which puts in question such fundamental categories as those of the nation-state, the social link between birth and nation as well as between human and citizen. Such a reconstruction promises to liberate an interpretative field for categorical reactivation aiming at consistent politics where the refugee question will not be separated and excluded from the structure of the national state order, or from the logic of human rights. Nor will the refugee be an exile among insoluble ethical problems.

Keywords: methodological status, everyday live, sociological form, archetype, cultural patterns, typical crisis, marginal, immigrant, foreigner, human rights, refugee

This article examines the uprisings since 2011 through a global lens. It focuses on a form that has become common to all: the continuous occupation of public space. Beginning in 2011, people from all walks of life came to the central squares of the world’s cities and formed various semi-permanent sites of protest. The article assesses the historical lineage and significance of these public occupations and discusses their impact for our understandings of revolution, democracy, and their interrelation. What happened during these uprisings, how the people who were present took part in them, offers a radically different version of democracy, in theory and practice, from the liberal representative one that has become hegemonic today. This article will underscore how this alternate vision of a democratic society is intimately tied to a new form of contentious politics, one predicated on occupation and arrest rather than movement and dispersal. To do so, it highlights how these uprisings have called into question two assumptions common to the liberal understanding of contemporary politics: the association between democracy and representative government; and the association between social struggle and the category of movement. In this context, the article challenges the continued use of the term social movement to define contentious political struggle in the 21st century and makes the case for a theory and practice of social arrest. It argues that a politics of social arrest has come to define the globa occupations of public space since 2011, a politics that has turned these spaces into immanent sites of democratic self-institution.

Keywords: democracy, revolution, uprising, social movement, Occupy, Gezi, Arab Spring

The paper briefly compares protests in Bulgaria in the early 1990s and in the post-EU accession period stating that they significantly differ in their affinity for and representations of sovereignty and democracy. While the former pleaded for democratization without challenging the nation-state frame of sovereignty, the latter raised urgently the question of reframing. Paradoxically, the vocabulary of this challenge is the critique of alienation turned into a structure of corporate subjection. This sheds some light on the ‘negativity’ of contemporary protests, their aspiration to devalue power and to oppose democracy to politics, and, in short, their ambivalence.

Keywords: protests, social critique, psychologization of inequality, corporate loyalty

Interview with Vincent Descombes by Boyan Znepolski

Vincent Descombes is Professor of philosophy at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris (EHESS – Paris). He has taught also at the University of Nice, the University of Montreal, the Sorbonne, the American unversities Johns Hopkins (Baltimore) and Emory (Atlanta). His publications include: Modern French Philosopy (1980), The Mind’s Povisions: A Critique of Cognitivism (2010), The Institutions of Meaning: A Defense of Anthrpological Holism (2014), Puzzling Identities (2016). His book Le complément de sujet (2004) has been awarded the Big Prize for philosophy of the French Academy.

Introduction to the Phenomenology of Rene Descartes, Sofia: Literaturen vestnik Foundation