Abstract

This pilot project will investigate how the war against Ukraine is transforming the state-society complex in Russia. The project opens new research avenues by proposing an original framework for understanding the relationship between violence and political economy. Specifically, the research will closely explore three analytical angles: (1) violence as enterprise; (2) violence as labour; and (3) violence as ideology. Conceived as a first step in a broader research agenda, the pilot project aims to shed light on the internal logic of ongoing societal transformations in Russia that can feed into subsequent research that provides more accurate measures of the exact scope and amplitude of the studied phenomena. It is expected that the research findings can facilitate subsequent quantitative studies on the topic and that they can be scaled to studies of transnational constellations in the region.

The project builds on a strand of critical theory employing the analytical apparatus of political economy and on studies of Russia’s capitalist transformation in the post-Soviet period. While the research design is intentionally kept open to novel theoretical insights, the investigation will build on three mechanisms connected to each of the analytical angles as entry points for the empirical analysis: accumulation by dispossession, debt entrapment, and inferred justification. The theoretical focus on the dynamics of transformation is aligned with a methodological approach grounded in process tracing. The method is well-suited to facilitate the reconstruction of causal mechanisms, systematise the assessment of heterogeneous pieces of data, and alleviate the missing data problem. The analysis will rely on evidence drawn from a variety of sources, including statistical data, textual data, and original interviews. The challenges of studying the political economy of Russia in the context of war will be mitigated by an emphasis on developing mutually beneficial research collaborations, including through the organisation of a specialised workshop.

The primary objectives of this pilot project are: (1) to expand the understanding of the transformative dynamics of violence; and (2) to facilitate research collaborations. In addition, this pilot project opens vantage points on the conditions for a sustainable and equitable post-war order. As the research engages in a discussion about the societal impact of the war and the dysfunctional aspects of state-society dynamics, it carries a strong potential to contribute to knowledge-transfer and the policy-driven debate about the post-war reconstruction.