Scapegoating International Socialisation: Russia’s (Re-)Encounter Narrative 1999-2018

Abstract

This thesis argues that Russia has used Ukraine and other third actors as scapegoats for Russia’s self-perceived failures in the Western-led international order after the Cold War. Building on critical International Relations (IR) scholarship on social hierarchy and identity, the thesis’s starting point is to take states’ socialisation memory seriously and study how it evolves and shapes state identity and behaviour. I argue that Russia, through its changing memory of the intense socialisation in the 1990s, developed a two-pronged negative self-perception as Inauthentic and Incompetent because of the experience of a double socialisation failure: losing the authentic Self in the unsuccessful struggle to acquire the competent traits typical of Western, socially elevated states. I bring in scapegoating theory to theorise how Russia could scapegoat its Others for its socialisation failures. The thesis develops this theoretical framework of scapegoating socialisation through abductive theorising, i.e. iterative theory-building between pre-existing concepts and empirical discovery. The methodologies used for empirical analysis are poststructuralist discourse and narrative analysis of Russian-language texts from 1999 to 2018. Empirically, the thesis contributes to scholarly understanding of Russia’s post-Soviet course from embracing to rejecting Western norms and the role of Third Others in this pivot. I show how Russia’s actions were shaped by the continuous re-evaluation of its past navigation of the Western-led international social hierarchy. Russia’s evolving memory of its failed post-Cold War socialisation created shameful parts of the Russian Self that were later externalised through narrative scapegoating. This explains Russia’s narrative vilification and violent suppression of its Third Others, including Chechnya, the opposition, Georgia and Ukraine. The latter became Russia’s primary socialisation scapegoat from 2014, which helps explain Russia’s large-scale war against Ukraine from February 2022. While the thesis’s scope is post-Soviet Russia, it offers theoretical implications beyond this case. The thesis contributes to the still-limited understanding of process, identity and agency in the critical international socialisation literature. First, it provides a dynamic understanding of the socialisation process by addressing the question of evolving socialisation memory. Secondly, it opens the black box of post-socialisation ambivalent identity by studying identity-making against multiple Others and the use of scapegoating. Thirdly, it demystifies hybrid agency by showing how the agency of marginal actors in international social hierarchy is circumscribed by these actors’ own socialisation memory. Overall, the thesis’s framework offers analytical purchase for understanding how Russia and similar actors might scapegoat Third Others to compensate for memories of socialisation failure in the Western-led international order.