The Political Science Research Centre (CICP) invites all those interested to attend the workshop “The Impact of Emotions on Changing Identities and Sovereignty in the Post-Soviet Space” to be held at 2.30pm on November 7 in room 0.04 of the School of Economics and Management at the University of Minho.
The event will be presented by Professor Sergei Akopov and Professor Sandra Fernandes.
This workshop will look at the concept of sovereignty not only in relation to state, identity, or power but also in relation to the distinction between concepts of ‘loneliness’ and ‘solitude.’ Considering this goal, it analyses ‘loneliness’ as a concept with potentially deep explanatory value when posing major questions in political theory. Building on the existing literature on the connection between ‘sovereignty’ and ‘political identity,’ we will extend such analysis towards a consideration of the interconnection between sovereignty and different forms of loneliness. We will also relate ‘sovereignty’ to ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ modes of ‘organized loneliness.’ The main aim is to use the framework of political representations of emotions to illustrate how a particular type of ‘loneliness’ – ‘loneliness anxiety’ – is filled with political reason. In empirical part of the workshop, we will illustrate three specific models in which the ‘management of loneliness anxiety’ may provide legitimacy, including for Russia’s conservative ideological program of ‘state-civilization’ and recent developments in Russian foreign policy. We will also explore what political metaphors of Russia’s ‘sovereignty’ and ‘intervention’ tell us about the mechanisms of the ‘organized politics of loneliness’, as a specific way of relating to (and imagining) the world, in contemporary Russia.
2 compulsory upstream readings:
Akopov, Sergei. Sovereignty as ‘organised loneliness’: an existential approach to the sovereigntism of Russian ‘state-civilization’, Journal of Political Ideologies, October 25, 2021. DOI: 10.1080/13569317.2021.1990560
Akopov, Sergei. Metaphors of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘intervention’ of Russia’s loneliness in a global world, in: Envisioning the World: Mapping and Making the Global. Ed. by M. Albert, S. Holtgreve, K. Preuß. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2021, 145-164. [Open access].
