Anni Roth Hjermann

How does a security dilemma dynamic between parties deemed not to hold hostile intentions toward each other emerge and escalate? This article investigates Russian official discourse on NATO engagement in Europe post-Crimea (2014), and its impact on security interaction in the Arctic. We also examine how Russia represents NATO intentions and actions in a context seen by Russia as a relation of war. We identify the effect of these changing representations of self and other for the emerging securitization dilemma in relations between Russia and NATO, arguing that they have replaced uncertainty about NATO’s hostile intentions with certainty. Although Russia still articulates the Arctic as a unique cooperative region, there may be little space left for non-conflictual Russian action when encountering NATO in the Arctic. We highlight the agency and importance of evolving political rhetoric in creating a dangerous situation where lethal conflict can occur between parties who do not seek it...

This study investigates the role of discourses in processes of democratic decline. By bringing Jacques Rancière’s works on politics and depoliticization into dialogue with poststructuralist discourse analysis, the thesis argues that discursive depoliticization contributes towards authoritarian consolidation, and displays how domestic-international dynamics play a key role in such depoliticization. The thesis offers a method for unpacking discursive depoliticization empirically by conceptualizing Rancière’s logics as ideal-typical depoliticizing discourses. It probes the analytical value of the developed framework by applying it to Russian official discourse in recent years (2015-2020). Empirically, the thesis finds that depoliticizing discourses enable authoritarian consolidation in Russia under Putin, and that these discourses have been produced in a co-dependent space of domestic and international politics. The concept of ‘democracy’ has near-completely disappeared from official domestic discourse and has been transferred to the international realm, where it is reinterpreted as ‘respect for the particularities of states’. The thesis concludes that discourses matter for democratic because they delineate the space in which politics proper is perceived as possible. It puts forward the concept of discursive depoliticization as a novel perspective on ‘hybrid’ regimes, right-wing, populist and ‘illiberal’ movements, and argues for further refinement of the framework’s concepts to address authoritarian consolidation.