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The neo-Marxist literature on uneven and combined development has made significant progress towards a comprehensive theory of the international. Its point of departure is societal multiplicity as a fundamental condition of the international. This article identifies an important lacuna in the ontology of multiplicity: there is no discussion of what constitutes a 'society', or the basic entity capable of entering a relationship with other entities. Existing solutions, including those relying on relational sociology, gravitate towards ontological individualism. Building on poststructuralist neo-Gramscian theories, I propose to ground the conceptualisation of 'society' in the notion of hegemony. This implies a discursive ontology, which attributes the inside/outside dynamic to hegemonic formations rather than states or societies. Coupled with the understanding of hegemony as a scalar phenomenon, this ontology can account for the primacy of the state in modern times, while also enabling a research focus on other types of collectivities.

Russian identity politics and, more broadly, the country's development in modern times has been conditioned by two constitutive splits: between the imperial elites and the peasant masses, on the one hand, and between Russia and Europe, on the other. The current conservative turn aims to overcome the internal split by attuning state policy to mass consciousness, with its alleged preference for 'traditional values'. This strategy ignores the fact that today's Russia is a modern, urbanised society. In the long run, it undermines the Kremlin's effort to achieve and consolidate great power status.

This article focusses on the concept of decision and its significance for identity politics. Constructivist scholarship established long ago that identity and foreign policy are mutually constitutive and that difference and othering are key for the production of identities. As a consequence, constructivist literature on EU foreign policy has focussed on the role of specific others and explored how interaction with them shapes the EU's identity. Our article turns the attention back inside and looks at the hegemonic struggles around the purpose and meaning of the European project. By analyzing the EU's reaction to the Libyan events in 2011, we demonstrate how a major international crisis dislocates the identities involved and unleashes a struggle for hegemony between conflicting discursive articulations. Eventually this conflict is resolved through a political decision, which reconfigures the entire 'global' outlook on Europe and its role in the world. By defining decision along poststructuralist lines, as distinct from the conventional literature on decision-making, we demonstrate that the use of this conceptual prism helps deepen our understanding of how othering and bordering work to produce and reshape identities. By doing that, we seek to contribute to a better understanding of how identities change in time.

AbstractThe nationwide prominence of Russian oppositional artists has inspired a fair number of studies analyzing the political aspects of their creative output. We argue that the new generation of Russian musicians, whose art became popular in the end of 2010s, brings political engagement to a qualitatively new level. Following Jacques Rancière, we reject the assumption that critical art can bring about political mobilization by exposing social evils. Instead, we juxtapose politics and police, distinguishing between transformative moments of discursive confrontation and the mundane activity centered on distributing places and roles. In this article, we look at three popular Russian musical collectives – IC3PEAK, Shortparis, and Monetochka – whose art disrupts the police order in a novel and subversive manner. Some of their works became even more timely with the outbreak of Russia's large-scale aggression against Ukraine. We have performed multimodal discourse analysis of their audio and video clips, aimed at identifying the ways in which these artworks create the conditions of possibility for new politics by re-articulating the connection between the political and the universal.

This forum reconsiders the standing of 'the international' in relation to 'critique'. Is this relation best understood in ways reminiscent of the 'Fourth Great Debate', where the international, associated with political realism, was targeted for deconstruction by critical approaches drawn from outside International Relations? Or is the international, on the contrary, itself a source of potential critique needing to be excavated and utilized, as recent debates on 'societal multiplicity' and Uneven and Combined Development have suggested? In this forum, seven international theorists debate the latter question from a range of intellectual perspectives.