Everyday foreign policy

Bol

This book offers a framework for analysing grass roots politics in Russia. It challenges the assumption that international relations only happen on the high level and instead focuses on the way general population enacts and re-interprets significant foreign policy concepts such as sanctions, wars, diplomacy, soft power and great power competition. Everyday foreign policy offers a theoretical framework for analysing grassroots politics in Russia. It challenges the assumption that international relations only operate at the highest levels, instead focusing on how the general population enacts and reinterprets significant foreign policy concepts.The book argues that everyday foreign policy is an assemblage – a combination of physical and cultural practices that inhabit digital and bodily spaces. By conceptualizing foreign policy in this way, the book sheds new light on concepts such as sanctions, wars, diplomacy, soft power, and great power competition, revealing how they are understood in the physical-digital entanglements involved with commenting, consuming, and forming an identity.Everyday foreign policy is essential reading on Russian politics, as it moves beyond the numerous existing studies on nationalism to provide a deep dive into the way ordinary Russians endorse the Kremlin’s foreign policy. While everyday high level practices have become an important area of study, the everyday of the every(wo)man has been overlooked both in theoretical and empirical conceptualizations. Building on feminist, sociological, and ethnographic research, this book argues that everyday foreign policy is an assemblage – a combination of physical and cultural practices that inhabit digital and bodily spaces. Following the feminist call to liberate international relations from the straitjacket of high politics, this book contextualizes foreign policy within daily practices of regular citizens, who also have their own motivation behind reposting memes, eating a certain kind of cheese or shaming women for their dating preferences. This book focuses on Russian grass roots foreign policy after the annexation of Crimea, zeroing in on fetishization of Putin, militarization, sanctions, Russian-Turkish and Russian-American relations, FIFA World Cup and the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Pages: 208, Paperback, Manchester University Press