The Geopolitical Imaginary in Putin's Rhetoric of War

• In Event: Framing War and Peace: Russian Rhetoric and Media in the Ukraine Conflict

Abstract

In Putin's rhetoric of war, the web of legitimization strategies deliberately plays to the expectations of a broad national and international audience, ensuring a diffuse understanding of the Kremlin's positions. The presentation will analyze one aspect of this complex rhetoric, its geopolitical argumentation. According to this, the war against Ukraine is seen as the beginning of tectonic shifts in the world order. Putin imagines the Russian Federation as the engine of an anti-colonial movement that can lead the "global South" in the struggle against American "hegemony. Putin's anti-colonial rhetoric minimizes the war against Ukraine, making it almost disappear in the grand panorama of geopolitical upheaval.

Author

• Riccardo Nicolosi, Ludwig-Maximilians-U Munich (Germany)