2023 10/13 Sergei Erofeev

Sergei Erofeev

Vladimir Putin’s Aggression and Suicide: The Cultural-Interactionist Perspective

Sergei Erofeev is a research professor at Rutgers University, USA. Before leaving Russia in 2015, Dr. Erofeev worked as a Vice Rector of the Higher School of Economics, Moscow and the Dean of International Programs at the European University at Saint Petersburg. He is a scholar of culture, emigration, and communication, and is currently working on the methodology of research in “tectonic value shifts” and the cultures of mafia state and terrorism.

           Summary

Trying to understand Russia’s war in Ukraine, policymakers and political commentators often reduce its resolution to traditional negotiations, discourse of madness, or to what can be called “Snyder syndrome”, i. e. absolutization, essentialization or immanentization of Putin’s fascist imperialism. Contrary to that, to explain the war’s driving forces and prospects, Erofeev employs a sociological perspective on the nature of Putin’s internal rule and external aggression showing his limited terrorist rationality and how his traditionalist mafia culture works through capturing the state and parasitizing on the modern structure of society.

October 13, 2023 from 3-5:30 PM

Institute for the Humanities
BSB (Behavioral Sciences Building)
1007 W Harrison str., Suite 153