Kategoriale Dissonanzen. Russlands regressiver Weg in den Krieg und die Historische Soziologie imperialistischer Außenpolitiken

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 evokes the diagnosis of a war of imperialist conquest. At the same time, theoretical approaches to imperialism in the analysis of Russia’s foreign policy enjoy a contradictory niche existence. The critical social sciences, on the one hand, attribute imperialism to capitalist dynamics and US hegemonic aspirations in the 20th and 21st centuries. Political science and sociological approaches, on the other hand, typically focus on the ideological dimension of imperialism or normalize imperialist foreign policies in transhistorical typologies of empire. Based on a critique of existing explanatory accounts, this article attempts to delineate Russian imperialism since the late 2000s. In doing so, it argues that, against the backdrop of a dual crisis of Russia’s political economy of rent and the state elite’s political legitimacy, a regressive sovereignist project has emerged since 2008 that relies on militarist policies for its own reproduction. In Russia’s foreign affairs, this regression crystallized primarily around the articulation and attempted implementation of imperial claims of control over Ukraine’s body politic. However, explanations based on the axiom of a global or Russian capitalism or the atavistic ideology of the Russian state elite remain deficient. Instead, the paper draws on recent historical-sociological perspectives on foreign policy as well as concepts from the older field of Historical Social Science in German International Relations (IB) and proposes a historicizing approach to the reconstruction of foreign policy. Alongside the fundamental contextuality of international politics, this approach emphasizes the processual co-constitution of crisis-ridden socio-economic development, strategic elite projects to (re-)legitimize power, and geopolitics.