When every act is war: Post-Crimea conflict dynamics and Russian foreign policy (WARU)

The project investigates how adversarial relations can spread to engulf the entire relation through totalizing images of the other party as threat. The spiral of worsening relations between Russia and the West since 2014 is the empirical focal point. In autumn 2020, a virtual workshop organized by ZOiS was held: 1) Corporaexplorer was presented (Gjerde) and discussed as tool for carrying out discourse analysis in work with empirical case studies. 2) An article that theorises and examines escalation empirically using Corporaexexplorer and with Norwegian-Russian relations as a case presented (Wilhelmsen). 3) Different origins of rhetorical commonplaces of threat and ways of studying them were explored. In spring 2021, the project participants worked on article drafts for the panel 'Russia-West relations: Changing discourses of the Other post-Crimea' for the Fifth Annual Tartu Conference on Russian and East European Studies: 1) ‘Double standards vs. whataboutism: colliding commonplaces in Russian and US official rhetoric’ (Gjerde) 2) ‘NATO is approaching our borders, should we not react: Rhetorical commonplaces as drivers of Russian securitization of NATO’ (Wilhelmsen & Hjermann) 3) ‘Mass Common Sense and Mutual Othering in Estonia and Russia: approaching the problem’ (Morozov) 4) ‘The West and selected Western actors in the Russian media: Post-Crimea dynamics’ (Chimiris). The panel attracted a young audience and was an important first step in the direction of achieving impact in the form of a factual and research-based exchange about Russia and the West within the discipline of Russian area studies. In the project's second workshop 2021 (NUPI), we discussed how to theorize and empirically investigate discourses of threat based on Toal's methodological map of strategies and categories in such work and in the project participants own work with papers presented at the Tartu conference. In September 2021 a roundtable organized by the University of Tartu on the dynamics of escalation between East and West using the crises in Belarus as an example was carried out in a face-to-face format in Tallinn. Empirical findings from research on the protest movement in Belarus (Sasse), a view from Moscow (Nikitina), and the WARU project's framework for explaining how conflict escalates (Wilhelmsen) were presented. The round table was not without friction, because it is unusual to study escalation as interaction, but it triggered an important and valuable exchange. Despite difficulties with keeping up research collaboration with Russian colleagues in autumn 2021 our Russian project member published the article 'The collective West Concept and Selected Western Actors in the Russian Media: Post-Crimea Dynamics'. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has affected the work of all project members, but has also shown how relevant the knowledge produced in WARU is. The WARU article 'Russian Certainty of NATO hostility' by Wilhelmsen and Hjermann was published in spring 2022. New articles under development were presented at EISA in Athens and at an internal WARU workshop in Berlin/ZOiS in August 2022 where also Lundby Gjerde's PhD 'Russia,' double standards', and the contestation of equivalence: a corpus based exploration' was presented. In connection with the Tartu conference in June 2023, a workshop was held and the project members presented a WARU paper panel 'Threat constructions in Russia-West social relations since 2014'. WARU's capstone conference ‘Russia and the West – a new reality’ was conducted on 14 November 2023 at Sentralen in Oslo, with 360 in the audience and 900 views on stream. The round table 'Diplomacy in Russia's war on Ukraine: Reality on the ground and status of the debate' with WARU researchers and representatives from the Norwegian MFA and MoD was held on 15 November 2023 at Salongen in Oslo. During autumn 2023, the articles 'The hubris of knowing hybridity...' (Hjermann and Wilhelmsen), 'Reimagining NATO after Crimea...' (Beaumont, Wilhelmsen and Gjerde) and 'Premonitions of the full-scale invasion: Comparing the positioning of Ukraine and Estonia in Russian official discourse' (Morozov and Mölder) were submitted for assessment in various peer-reviewed journals. Communication to a wider public in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 has been achieved through a series of chronicles in Norwegian, Estonian, American and British media that explain Russian-Western relations with reference to discursive representations. Project leader Wilhelmsen was awarded the Free Speech Prize 2023 for 'having contributed nuanced professional knowledge in a heated public exchange of words, before and after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and showing the importance of courage of speech and the exercise of academic freedom of speech in practice.' So far WARU has published 5 peer-reviewed articles and a PhD that deals with the project's empirical and theoretical focus areas.

How can we explain the spiral of worsening relations between Russia and the West since 2014? The WARU project posits that we cannot adequately explain Russian foreign policy and Russia's deteriorating relations with the West without understanding the specific conflict dynamics evolving between these two political entities. The project will explore this proposition through case studies of Russia's interactions with Norway, Estonia, Germany, NATO and the USA. It will provide an in-depth empirical study of how inimical rhetoric about the other party becomes seen as self-evident and unproblematic (through 'rhetorical commonplaces'), making it appear natural, even necessary, to treat the other party as a threat. By applying and developing securitization theory and other epistemologically related contributions, the project will also conceptualize how rhetorical interaction between political entities contributes to conflict escalation. The WARU research group consists of highly qualified scholars of Russian foreign policy, familiar with discourse analysis and quantitative, computer-assisted methods. The issue in focus has acute political relevance; the insights produced by WARU will be of high value for policymaking and for well-informed public debate on Russia.