Trickstery: pluralising stigma in international society

Abstract

International politics is often imagined via a binary opposition between the oppressor and the oppressed. Attention to entrenched hierarchies of power is essential in the study of international politics. However, taking this division too rigidly can obfuscate the very mechanisms of power that must be understood in order to grasp these hierarchies. We identify one such mechanism in the practice of trickstery, particularly as practiced in the context of Russia’s ambivalent and conflicted place in international society. Through the dynamics of trickstery, we show the workings of stigmatisation to be a plural phenomenon, giving rise to various normative challenges. The trickster is both conformist and deviant, hero and anti-hero – a “plural figure” both reflecting the rich cultural texture of international society and contesting its hierarchies. The trickster particularly unsettles the ideal liberal (global) public sphere through its simultaneous performance of emancipatory and anti-emancipatory logics. In this, trickstery produces normatively undecidable situations that exceed the analytical capacities of, for example, the strategic use of norms, norm contestation, and stigma management literatures. We find trickstery to be encapsulated in the contemporary international situation of Russia, while recognising that its practices are potentially available to other actors with similarly liminal status and cultural repertoires. We particularly analyse the trickster practice of ‘overidentification’ with norms, which apparently endorses but indirectly subverts the normative frameworks within which it is performed. Such overidentification is a form of satire, contemporaneously appropriated by state actors, which has indeterminate yet significant effects.

Constructivism and Peaceful Change

“…With the change or demise of the so-called liberal order (Ikenberry 2018;Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Hofmann 2019), many normative 'advancements' appear to be contested and reversible. The emerging research programs on normative contestation (Wiener 2018), regional specificities and interwoven global-regional dynamics (Acharya 2017;Kurowska and Reshetnikov 2020), and cultural diversity (Reus-Smit 2017; Phillips and Reus-Smit 2020) enable constructivist researchers to make sense of these dynamics. Future theoretical developments could spell out more precisely the conditions of peaceful versus violent change.…”

Selling internet control: the framing of the Russian ban of messaging app Telegram

“…Research also indicates there is a high prevalence of conspiracy reasoning in Russian political and media discourses and mass culture (Wijermars, 2020a; Borenstein, 2019;Yablokov, 2015Yablokov, , 2018. A final frame emerging from the literature is the rhetorical strategy of overidentification with liberal norms, including rule of law, which has been demonstrated in Russian diplomacy (Kurowska & Reshetnikov, 2021). The validity of these frames was tested through a manual reading of a sample of the media corpus.…”

“…Rule of law: this frame emphasizes legislation and compliance. With regards to Russian diplomacy, Kurowska and Reshetnikov (2021) argue that Russia's contradictory, mocking or even blatantly false public statements are best understood through the concept of trickery, in which overidentification with liberal norms (sovereignty; the equality of states) takes center stage (for example, in Russia's invocation of international legal norms to justify its military intervention in Georgia in 2008). The overidentification is effective in levelling out power relations and undermining these very norms, since '[c]alls for strict compliance put on public display the structural hegemony and quotidian hypocrisy of those liberal actors who profess but routinely breach liberal norms' (Kurowska & Reshetnikov, 2021, p. 12).…”

Russia and the diffusion of political norms: the perfect rival?

“…Kurowska and Reshetnikov refer to Russia's "trickster practice of 'overidentification' with norms, which apparently endorses but indirectly subverts the normative frameworks within which it is performed." 92 Self-evidently, the argument of parody as contestation can be analytically challenging. While offering a revealing perspective, it may be problematic when it is simply assumed that Russia's imitation of norms is driven by the consistent intention to mock them, while the same question is not asked about other actors referring to similar norms.…”