POLITICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE AUTHORITIES’ AND POPULATION’S EXPECTATIONS REGARDING RUSSIAN GOVERNORS (BASED ON RESEARCH OF THE NEW GENERATION GOVERNORS)

The purpose of the article was to find an answer to the question of how governors of the “new generation” meet the needs of the federal center and the population, and whether they are effective managers. The authors conducted a political and psychological study to answer this question using the following methods: analysis of secondary data from analytical centers, interviews with experts, in-depth interviews with the population, case-study and semantic differential. In the course of the study, the authors revealed the similarity of a number of expectations from both the authorities and the population: both sides want to see a new, promising, open politician who can independently solve managerial and economic issues in the region, etc. However, there were also differences in the goals and objectives set by the federal Center when appointing interim heads of the region or after elections,which to some extent contradicts the demands of society. In addition, the project "Young Technocrats" created for "novice" governors does not hold up to its name because the average age of "novice" governors has increased significantly, and the previously assumed universal concept of governing any territory, regardless of its membership has not been completely effective. At the same time, the political and psychological criteria highlighted in the article are one of the factors that influence the active renewal of the governor's corps which is both a trend and an answer to the problems of the governor's corps.

DEATH IN THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF J. DERRIDA: TERRORISM, SECRECY, DEATH PENALTY AND THE CRISIS OF THE MODERN NATIONAL STATE

The article outlines the main crisis points and trends in the development of the modern nation-state. Special attention is paid to the consideration of the phenomenon of terrorism as an inevitable product of the Enlightenment project. The coronavirus pandemic has made the problem points more relevant, calling into question not only the essence of democracies, but also the irreversibility of the processes of globalization. The author suggests following the logic of the argumentation of the French philosopher J. Derrida, who preferred to deconstruct the power discourse in order to find an answer to the question: how and to what extent is it possible to combat violence and terror, the products of modern Western civilization. The article consistently examines the prerequisites for understanding death not only as a secret rooted in antiquity and associated with the classical paradigm of philosophizing, phenomenology, Heideggerianism and existentialism, but also as an economy of mourning for the dead, which is close to psychologism and Freudianism. The focus is concentrated on the study of the mechanisms of the sovereign state that help it to claim comprehensive possession of the moment of death for a person sentenced to death. Capital punishment - an instrument of control on the part of sovereignty - is interpreted as the core of the theological and political tradition that determines the orthogenesis of any nation-state. Finally, the author considers the concept of the “heart of the other” as a starting point for the fight against abuse and for debunking phantasms and illusions that are an integral feature of the modern political organism. It is the deconstruction of the death penalty that is the key subject touched upon by the author of the article.

THE POLITICAL WORLDVIEW OF VKONTAKTE COMMUNITIES: THE EXPERIENCE OF ANALYZING THE SUBJECTIVE SPACE OF POLITICS IN A NETWORK SOCIETY

The article presents the results of a theoretical analysis of the political worldview as part of the subjective space of politics in a network society and its empirical verification. The author shows that the integration of phenomenology and the network approach allows researchers to advance their understanding of content and parameters of the political worldview of network communities as part of the subjective space of modern public policy. The analysis of the discourse of network communities makes it possible to identify, describe and analyze the features of their political worldview. The author presents an original methodology, created within the framework of the RFBR research project "Subjective Space of Politics: Opportunities and Challenges of a Network Society", for studying the political world view of network communities and the empirical results obtained with its usage. In particular, the typology of political worldviews existing in network communities is described. It reflects the structural and substantive components of the political worldview in the discourse of network communities: the core of the political worldview (reflecting the ontological level of the political worldview, including images of the Motherland, state, power), political roles, political institutions (the last two clusters reflect the basic level of the political worldview elements), political participation (reflects the instrumental level of the political worldview), socio-political problems). The typology of political worldviews of network communities identified (zero, horizontal, non-political, activity and political world view of active resistance) requires verification in further research. An important result of the empirical analysis is the identification of two political worldview profiles (closed and open) and their connection with the dominant type of participant socio-political activity in network communities. Further study in this direction will improve analytical and predictive tools for research and practical work with network communities.

ELECTORAL BEHAVIOR OF RUSSIAN CITIZENS IN THE 1996-2018 FEDERAL ELECTIONS ON THE TERRITORY OUTSIDE THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

This article describes the course of voting in federal elections (President of the Russian Federation, deputies of the State Duma of the Russian Federation) in the period from 1996 to 2018. The basics of organizing voting outside the Russian Federation and the procedure for registering foreign voters in electoral statistics are described. The study analyzed voting in federal elections in foreign countries with more than 500 voters in key political forces that participated in the elections to the State Duma in 1999-2016 and candidates for the office of President of the Russian Federation in the 1996-2018 elections (party in power, communists, liberals, LDPR, etc.). The sample includes countries on virtually every continent of the globe. Information on the ownership of foreign sites by specific countries is taken from the relevant decisions of the Central Election Commission. Unfortunately, the authors have only incomplete data on voting in the 1990s (there is no information at all for voting in foreign polling stations in the 1995 State Duma elections, for the 1996 presidential elections there is information only about voting in the countries of the former USSR, for elections to the State Duma in 1999 there is only fragmentary information from foreign sites). Since 2003, data on voting has been published in full due to the introduction of the State Automated System “Vybory” (GAS “Vybory”).

THE PALESTINIAN CASE AND ITS PLACE ON RUSSIA’S FOREIGN POLICY AGENDA

The events of the “Arab spring” and its consequences as well as the “Iranian threat”, which became a key security challenge for the Gulf States, not without the efforts of Benjamin Netanyahu and supported by the pro-Israel Trump administration (2016-2020), seemed to have removed the Palestinian case from the priority list of Middle East issues. The role of Russia, the traditional partner of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) since Soviet times, also looked more low- key after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, especially amid resolution of the military-political crisis in Syria. Russian diplomacy on the Palestinian track remained unnoticed compared to the activity in the region of Donald Trump’s envoys, who promoted a peace plan for settling the Palestinian-Israeli conflict known as the “deal of the century”. Having failed to achieve the main goal, the White House contributed to the signing of the “The Abraham Accords”, which was a breakthrough given that the Arab states declared the solution of the Palestinian issue as precondition for formal relations with the Jewish state. If Arab-Israeli normalization continues, Israel will have peace treaties with more than half of the Arab and Muslim states despite the deadlock in the peace process with the Palestinians. Based on the analysis of political processes amid the unresolved Palestinian problem, and above all, Russia’s attempts as a mediator to achieve a settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the author suggests that the Palestinian issue has not lost its political significance and relevance as much as the Israeli government under Netanyahu tries to sell it.

THE DISCOURSE OF PATRIOTISM IN MODERN AMERICAN MASS CULTURE: THE CASE OF “WATCHMEN” TV SERIES

This article examines the role of popular culture products as a factor in changing the concept of patriotism in the United States. The discourse of patriotism is formed through a “sum” of images including an assessment of the political system, values and national history. According to American sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, “gaining power depends on the outcome of struggles for symbolic domination in the civil sphere”. The exacerbation in the last decade of problems related to race, gender and social justice led to a split in society and created the demand for a critical revision of the history of the United States, and as result the revision of the concept of patriotism. Nowadays, more and more graphic novels and media-shows based on patriotism are focusing on issues of social justice, and play an important role in the “culture wars” in the United States. An example of this is the popular series “Watchmen”, which has received various influential awards. Through the plot about superheroes, its authors construct a new narrative of civic patriotism. This narrative assumes that the racial issue has been a key factor in US history and that the country was founded on the principles of intolerance and oppression. In addition, it is suggested that the political system, in turn, is only formally democratic and the founding fathers created a state that is prone to authoritarianism and suppression, regardless of which political party is in power. Therefore, radical reforms are required for the United States to become a truly democratic and inclusive country.

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL JUDGMENTS IN THE CONTEXT OF DIGITALIZATION

Discourse analysis of texts and speeches has been one of the most popular research methods since the second half of the XX century. Its emergence is associated with the works of postmodernists, such as Deleuze, J. Derrida, M. Foucault, E. Laclos, and S. Mouffe. The method is interesting because it allows us to take into account the context of expressed judgments and to uncover the implied meaning of statements. Despite the widespread use of this method, no unified methodology has been created. In foreign and Russian science, parallel trends and schools in the field of discourse analysis were formed, the most influential of which is discussed in this article. The emergence of social networks, digital platforms and applications has set a new trend in modifying and creating new variants of discourse analysis of texts and judgments, but already in a digital environment. Some of them, such as Y.G. Misnikov’s approach, can serve as an alternative to studying public opinion by means of a social survey. The purpose of this article is to analyze and systematize both traditional methods of discourse analysis of political judgments and new approaches using social networks, apps, websites, and digital platforms. In the course of the research, the methods of classification and systematization as well as, general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis were used. In the context of digitalization, five varieties of discourse analysis method were considered for text analysis in a digital environment: critical discourse analysis, corpus discourse analysis, mediated discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, and discourse analysis using artificial intelligence. A thorough analysis of these methods allowed us to identify a gap in the analysis of political judgments on digital platforms of interaction between the government and the population, and to propose a variant of filling it on the basis of A. Kruglanski's parametric model.

ARMED FORCES OF THE STATE AS AN INSTRUMENT TO SERVE THE INTERESTS OF GLOBAL AND TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS

In the article, the armed forces of the state are considered as a tool to serve the interests of global and transnational corporations. The problem is studied within the framework of the methodology of geopolitical realism. It is argued that the global and transnational corporations are economic empires and they have a structural characteristic of an empire as such: imperial center (a particular corporation), inclusions (other global and transnational corporations absorbed by this corporation) and economic limitrophes (dependent companies, in the share capital of which this global or transnational corporation has a blocking/controlling stake). With the collapse of the USSR and the world system of socialism, economic empires become a global actor not only in economic processes, but also in political and socio-cultural processes. Under the influence of these processes, the institution of the state itself is reformatted. It is transformed into a corporation-state and becomes a social resource for the struggle of corporations in all geopolitical spaces. As a result, the armed forces, as a structural element of the state, serve not so much the interests of society as a whole, but mainly the interests of global and transnational corporations based in a given country. The main functions of the armed forces of the corporation-state in the process of conducting conventional military operations in defense of the interests of specific economic empires are the following: an armed struggle with organizations representing the interests of opposing economic empires; control of a territory with the resources that are being developed by ledger-based corporations located in the state, the structural element of which is these armed forces; the creation of obstacles (constant military threat) to penetrate a certain resource territory of competing economic empires without the use of warfare technologies or military bases.

TRENDS IN THE DEVELOPMENT AND POLITICAL INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF REGIONAL CONFLICTS IN THE REPUBLICS OF THE NORTH CAUCASUS

The article presents the results of a study of the main trends in the development of regional conflicts in the republics of the North Caucasus region (2010s-2020s), as well as the transformation of political institutions to manage them. Based on the conceptual analysis of the provisions of the conflictological and neoinstitutional approaches regarding the essence of the political institutionalization of conflicts, the authors conclude that the focus of this process is mainly on maintaining stability, and not on the development of the region. The revealed specificity of the development of regional conflict allows us to assert the presence of its cyclical nature, which manifests itself, in particular, in the periodic politicization and depoliticization of ethnicity. The latter remains a significant factor in the development of the region, primarily due to the formation of related identities, which is also manifested in the conflicts under study. The significant role of the confessional factor in conflicts has also been determined. It manifests itself both in the intensification of the religious radicalization of some citizens, primarily the youth, and in the opposition to it by moderately minded clergy. A change in the types of conflict in the region is noted: the scale of conflicts is decreasing and they are developing on the republic or local level. The intensity of the development of conflict situations and the number of violent manifestations of conflict decrease, while they more often take on a latent, non-public nature. As a reaction to this state of affairs, protest forms of expressing contradictions are actualized. In the coming years, the continuation of the trend associated with the hybrid political institutionalization of conflicts and the preservation of an orientation towards their "containment" is most likely.

Political Culture or the Culture of Politics? Polemical notes on a trivial topic

The author’s idea of revising the dictionary of modern Russian political science is a reaction to the mismatch of international and domestic discursive practices. The article deals with a critical attitude to “political culture”. This concept was introduced into circulation by scientists at that moment when political theory was in the stage of formation. The problem is that a concept designed to reflect the objective nature of politics is unambiguously related to the nature of culture. Meanwhile, culture and politics are the universal forms of human activity, each of which has its own specificity. Accordingly, the areas of social science also differ. To determine the specifics of political knowledge, the author suggests answering simple questions. What exactly does a political scientist measure: culture by politics or politics by culture; a political element in culture or the cultural (conscious, value, semantic) content of politics? Since the answers reflecting the subject priority of politics for a specialist in this field of knowledge are obvious, it is proposed to use the concepts of “culture of politics”, “cultural dimension of politics” and “cultural-political” instead of the concept of “political culture”. These expressions neutralize the formalism of the problem of “primary” and “secondary” in relations between culture and politics, politics and culture. From the perspective of the practical realities of Russian politics, the article examines such topical cultural and political aspects of modernity as the crisis of culture, the image of the future, the problem of distinguishing between transcendental and immanent political ideals. According to the author, a common theme for the modern domestic culture of politics should be an orientation towards a citizen as an immanent goal of the development of Russian statehood.