“Democratic Globalization” or “Global Coloniality”? An Antagonistic Discourse of an Anti-Corruption Movement in Russia

• In Event: Global Communication and Social Change Top Papers Session

Abstract

Many social activists today argue that we need to expand the frame of reference for democratic struggle from the local to the global. The globalization of outlook, they argue, should help us to stir up imagination so that suppressed possibilities of development can be imagined. But how would this “democratic” globalization differ from “global coloniality” if the conceptual grammar of the former is similar to that of the latter, as the omnipresent usage of such concepts as “modernization” and “development” suggests? Drawing on the discourse theory by Ernasto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Mouffe’s agonistic model of democracy, and Nico Carpentier’s conceptualization of the antagonistic discourse, this paper analyzes the “progressive” articulations of Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption movement in Russia. It shows how the latter undermined democracy rather than promoted it by uncritically reproducing the discourse of development and modernization and presenting those opposing the suggested “progressive” reforms as “underdeveloped” “barbarians.”

Author

• Olga Baysha, National Research U Higher School of Economics