It works by fostering psychological wariness in the population through the promotion of antihegemonic perspectives

Applied postmodernism as it is practiced by Russia has two features. The first is an attempt to promote a sense of epistemic insecurity amongst targeted populations by undermining existing bonds of trust between them and the sources of information on which they rely (Giles 2016: p. 37). The second is the promotion of ‘alternative’ or ‘antihegemonic’ perspectives or narratives, especially those in line with Russia’s foreign policy objectives (ibid.). Earlier I drew attention to a parallel that exists between Russia’s calls for multipolarity and the politics of identity. It will be useful to return to this example for the parallels that Russia’s IW strategy – aimed at bringing about multipolarity – has with an important aspect of postmodern theory, namely poststructuralism, and its relationship to identity politics.

Poststructuralism is a theory about language that stands in a subtle but important relationship to the politics of identity. It makes two central claims. The first is that words and phrases get their meanings not by referring to anything in the world, but by occupying a place within a network of relationships internal to a language. As an example, the term ‘funny’ gets its meaning by being the opposite of ‘unfunny’ and by standing in more complex relationships with ‘sarcastic’ and other related terms. Its second claim is that the place a term occupies in this network is fluid not fixed and that meaning is therefore also fluid. On such an account it is impossible simply to ‘report the facts’ of a given situation, because it is beyond the scope of language to refer to anything outside of itself. ‘Facts’ are therefore always constructed.

Such a view supports a politics of identity in two ways. First, it politicises language. Claims about the world are attempts to shape that world and they are thus intimately tied to power. And second, it places the perspective of the speaker or writer centre stage. In attempting to shape the world without the ability to reference any agreed or objective set of facts or standards the questions ‘for whom?’ or ‘in whose interest?’ naturally arise. What masquerade as neutral policies, language, even scientific studies, can then be severed from their claims to objectivity or their pursuit of the common good, and placed in the context of dominant or minority perspectives. The perspectives or narratives from which they emerge then partially determine their validity, something that can have a profound effect on the way people evaluate claims, with both liberating and dangerous implications.

I call Russia’s IW tactic ‘applied postmodernism’ because it plays an analogous role in their pursuit of multipolarity that postmodernism, and specifically poststructuralism, did for the emergence of identity politics. Poststructuralism severed the ties between empirical fact and language and replaced truth with ‘truths’, encased in an everproliferating set of narratives and perspectives. Russia’s strategy is to recreate this phenomenon at the international level. Significantly, a strategy that could achieve this would meet the three criteria I outlined above. (1) It would constitute an attempt to manipulate an enemy’s psychic condition and it would use informational systems to accomplish this. (2) In achieving its goals it would go some way towards neutralizing Europe’s ability to spread its values and undercut its justifications for intervention. And (3) an intensified politics of identity among the EU’s member states would be anathema to its proper functioning as an institution. Applied postmodernism, if effective, would thus have the power to destabilise enemy regimes. In the sections below I will attempt to explain how this strategy works in practice by examining one of Russia’s most important tools in its IW arsenal: its foreign broadcasting network, RT.

Before I do this, however, it will be useful to get a couple of things straight. The first is to note how applied postmodernism differs from traditional forms of propaganda. Russia’s strategy is fundamentally an asymmetrical one, born of its relative weakness on the world stage compared to the Soviet era. Where traditional propaganda aims to promote the truth of one side in particular, applied postmodernism aims to promote a view of the world in which truth is itself relative. This is a fundamentally different aim. It should also be stressed that by ‘applied postmodernism’ I do not mean the aggressive advocacy of a set of intellectual postulates. What Russia aims to implant in European minds is not a theoretical conviction but a psychological wariness—a wariness that, in effect, implants the postmodern perspective in those it affects. As Butler notes, ‘a great deal of postmodernist theory depends on the maintenance of a sceptical attitude’ (Butler 2002: p. 13). It is this attitude that Russia seeks to promote.