Trickstery: pluralising stigma in international society

Abstract

International politics is often imagined via a binary opposition between the oppressor and the oppressed. Attention to entrenched hierarchies of power is essential in the study of international politics. However, taking this division too rigidly can obfuscate the very mechanisms of power that must be understood in order to grasp these hierarchies. We identify one such mechanism in the practice of trickstery, particularly as practiced in the context of Russia’s ambivalent and conflicted place in international society. Through the dynamics of trickstery, we show the workings of stigmatisation to be a plural phenomenon, giving rise to various normative challenges. The trickster is both conformist and deviant, hero and anti-hero – a “plural figure” both reflecting the rich cultural texture of international society and contesting its hierarchies. The trickster particularly unsettles the ideal liberal (global) public sphere through its simultaneous performance of emancipatory and anti-emancipatory logics. In this, trickstery produces normatively undecidable situations that exceed the analytical capacities of, for example, the strategic use of norms, norm contestation, and stigma management literatures. We find trickstery to be encapsulated in the contemporary international situation of Russia, while recognising that its practices are potentially available to other actors with similarly liminal status and cultural repertoires. We particularly analyse the trickster practice of ‘overidentification’ with norms, which apparently endorses but indirectly subverts the normative frameworks within which it is performed. Such overidentification is a form of satire, contemporaneously appropriated by state actors, which has indeterminate yet significant effects.

Keywords

Trickstery norms diplomacy stigma culture satire

Introduction

On 1 April 2017, the Russian Foreign Ministry posted a caricature of an automated answering message, in Russian and English, on its official Facebook page: “To use the services of Russian hackers, press 2; to request election interference, press 3” (Hemment, 2017: 77, ft 32). Interpreted via conventional understandings of statecraft, ridiculing one’s own status as a perceived ‘hacking power’ by parodically embracing it on social media can only be baffling. Satire, prevarication and ambiguity about the truth are, however, common features of Russia’s contemporary diplomatic discourse. When asked by a journalist about the presence of Russian troops in Donbas in 2014, the Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoygu, for example, replied cryptically: ‘It is very difficult to look for a black cat in a dark room, especially if it is not there. All the more stupid to look for it there if this cat is clever, brave and polite’ (Shoygu cited in Lenta.ru, 2014; Polovinko, 2017).¹ Shoygu’s reply simultaneously denies and confirms the presence of Russian troops in the southeast of Ukraine but also goes beyond the long-familiar ‘neither confirm nor deny’ rhetorical trope of statecraft. In cases such as this, the issues at hand are of the utmost gravity—war and the breach of fundamental norms of international society—yet parody takes over. These actions may be a scene of performing ‘misrecognition’—that is, the dissonance between how actors recognise themselves and how they are recognised intersubjectively, with humour easing the tension and generating a (false) sense of superiority (see Adler-Nissen and Tsinovoi, 2019). However, we are invited to laugh not only with but also at the joker, whose parodic objective cannot control how the joke will be received. This paper suggests the concept of trickstery to make sense of such situations.

Trickstery straddles and pluralises two important interpretations: that of Russia’s deviancy in international society² that reinforces hegemonic norms (Morozov and Rumelili, 2012; Neumann and Pouliot, 2011; Zarakol, 2011), on the one hand, and that of a ‘subaltern empire’ that ruthlessly colonises its own periphery while cultivating a sense of its victimhood by the West, on the other (Morozov, 2015). The plural figure of the trickster maintains, in productive analytical tension, the images both of Russia as oppressor and as marginalised, while it also elucidates Russia’s theatrical invocations of international law that have earned Russia’s UN delegates the epithet of ‘the professionals of confusion’ (Security Council UN, 2017: 4).

Trickstery holds a mirror to hierarchies in international society and unearths controversies hidden in its core, thereby exposing double standards and heightening awareness of discrimination. Political openings by the trickster figure, such as creativity in liminality and transgression in satire, cannot, however, be simply celebrated, as they oscillate between playfulness and violence. They are poorly understood if framed through the binary of either emancipation or reproduction of domination. Trickstery can be made conceptually visible, however, via Weber’s critique of stigmatisation as ‘not just excluding plural subjects but also including plural subjects as singular subjects’ (Weber, 2016: 22). Drawing on Roland Barthes ([1974] 2002, [1976] 1989), Weber suggests operating in a plural mode of and/or logic that introduces a non-decidable plurality into meaning and thus confounds simple understandings of stigmatised versus stigmatising (Weber, 2016: 19–21).³ Such pluralised and/or logic serves to revisit the original statement by Erving Goffman about stigma that ‘[t]he stigmatised and the normal are part of each other; if one can prove vulnerable, it must be expected that the other can, too’ (Goffman, 1963: 135). In the pluralised reinterpretation, the deviant⁴ and the normal are not self-contained identities that, in their duality, institute a symbolic interactional order, swapping roles at times. Rather, they are plural subjects unto themselves and thus perform the stigmatised and the stigmatising simultaneously.

While we identify trickstery through the contemporary practices of Russian diplomacy, we do not claim this category to have any national or civilisational exclusivity. We approach it as a heterogenous and periodically contradictory figuration,⁵ which nevertheless remains intelligible across cultural contexts. It is both a shared cultural archetype and a situational script that certain actors choose or are forced to adopt in reaction to their liminal positionality. International Relations (IR) vocabularies sometimes allude to but have yet to openly or precisely articulate a complex concept of the trickster. In the first part of the article, we consult anthropology, semiotics and cultural studies in order to elicit the family of resemblances that characterise such a figure—an ancient character widespread in mythology and contemporary culture, embodying paradox and ambiguity.⁶ A boundary-crosser who defies definition and operates through humour in response to systemic disadvantage, the trickster is an outcast that is also respected and feared (Horváth and Szakolczai, 2020: 15). Simultaneously a ‘cultural hero’ and a ‘selfish buffoon’ (Carroll, 1984), it⁷ uses deception to confront its subordination to powerful others, lures with promises of redistribution, while exploiting both those more privileged and more marginalised (Laws, 2019: 4–5). As such, the trickster problematises the typology of norm stigmatisation in IR—that is, stigma acceptance, rejection and counter-stigmatisation (Adler-Nissen, 2014). Trickstery collapses such categories into one plural figuration.

The second part of the article discusses Russia as a trickster in international society. It, first, examines the conditions of possibility of trickstery, as well as of its methodological visibility, and, second, distinguishes ‘overidentification’ with norms as a contextual mechanism of trickstery and a burgeoning trademark of Russia’s diplomacy. These conceptualisations reflect anthropological accounts of the trickster as a character that is both pan-cultural and impossible to grasp outside of its context. The larger background to trickstery is constituted in the stratification of international society through norms (Mattern and Zarakol, 2016; Towns and Rumelili, 2017), while its performance draws on local cultural practice. Overidentification presents an overt endorsement of norms that, by introducing a form of ‘non-decidable plurality’, indirectly discredits such norms via their apparent validation. This theatrical scenario, wherein an actor performs a public defence of a norm as testimony to their normative commitment and its travesty, exceeds the analytical frameworks of the strategic use of norms (e.g. Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998; Payne, 2001; Hurd, 2005), norms contestation (e.g. Wiener, 2018, 2014; Deitelhoff and Zimmermann, 2020; Bloomfield, 2016) and norm transgression (Evers, 2017), as these focus on instrumental strategies, explicit differences in norm interpretation and outright resistance as well as cross-community arrangements that negotiate difference. Nor does trickstery register in the postcolonial critique of structural normativity understood as a manifestation of power relations (e.g. Epstein, 2017; Tlostanova, 2012). Such critique tends to assume a positive normative attachment to the subaltern – that is, a structurally disadvantaged actor (Makarychev and Morozov, 2013: 334). Subversion, more broadly, belongs to the valorised realm of resistance against oppression within a hierarchised society where art and satire take on liberating qualities (cf. Amoore and Hall, 2010; Rowe, 2013; Payne, 2016). Little scrutiny is given to expressions of plural agency by liminal figures that blend emancipatory and anti-emancipatory dynamics, as do tricksters.

The third and fourth parts showcase two performances of trickstery to trace overidentification in practice. The first vignette is an interview on the pro-Kremlin TV RT with the alleged poisoners of the former Russian spy Skripal and his daughter in September 2018 in Salisbury, UK. It features two ostensibly private citizens who present themselves as victims of unwanted attention, implying a homosexual relationship that they want to protect. The interview displays how trickstery embraces ridicule in the pursuit of dramatic effect. The protagonists – the spies and the RT interviewer – perform overidentification with (and thus mock) the values of transparency, accountability, privacy and non-discrimination. The upshot seems an outright failure as the trickster falls for its own traps. The second vignette is from Russia’s ultimately successful bid for a new UN resolution on responsible state behaviour in cyberspace in November 2018 (General Assembly UN, 2018a). By duplicitously overidentifying with the norm of sovereign equality, Russian sponsorship of the resolution effectuates the hierarchy-levelling potential of the trickster. We witness an intertwinement of reformist and exploitative machinations by a plural figure which risks, and/or promises, to throw doubts on the process, displaying the moral ambivalence of trickstery.

In the Conclusion, we ponder the implications of the plural character of trickstery in international society: It reveals the latter’s fault lines and contradictions but also relativises normative coordinates, of both hegemonic orders and emancipatory endeavours. The methodology of reading plural figures and the study of trickstery that has furthered that methodology displaces the either/or logic of stigmatisation and thus contributes to more ‘unbounded’ (Wendt, 2015: 167) analytics of international social dynamics, and more broadly to plurivalent analysis. This conceptual elucidation and the conversation on the international politics of trickstery need to confront, however, the ambiguous effects of trickstery.

Trickster: cultural archetype, contextual vocabulary

Jung famously conceived of the trickster as an identifiable archetype (Jung, 1956: 200) – a relatively stable, yet still elastic, set of qualities that re-emerge repeatedly in different times and cultures since antiquity. Yet any attempt to contain all tricksters in a single typology misses the point. They are fuzzy plurals formed within ‘locally understood webs of significance’ (Hyde, 1998: 74). The diversity of tricksters in myth, literature and art have long attracted scholarly attention. Anthropologists, semioticians and cultural studies scholars have examined the universal appeal of tricksters, as well as their particularities (e.g. Radin, 1956; Hynes and Doty, 1993; Hyde, 1998; Konrad, 2015; Morra and Reder, 2010). Hynes (1993: 34), for example, offers a cluster of trickster traits that describe it as an ambiguous and anomalous personality, deceiver/trick-player, shape-shifter, situation-inverter, messenger/imitator of the gods and sacred/lewd bricoleur. In what follows, we identify a set of family resemblances around the trickster figure relying in particular on Mark Lipovetsky (2011), who studied Soviet and post-Soviet tricksters⁸: (1) moral and ontological ambivalence; (2) transformation of tricks into art form; (3) liminality; and (4) a peculiar relation to the sacred. We discuss these with reference to classic and contemporary studies of tricksters.

Moral and ontological ambivalence

Unlike ‘the Devil [who] is an agent of evil’, writes Hyde (1998: 10, emphasis original), ‘the trickster is amoral, not immoral’. The trickster is an inherently dualistic character in which good and evil are intertwined. Radin (1956: ix) has described it as ‘at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself’. The trickster brings about a cultural breakthrough (like Prometheus who gives people fire) and commits the most horrendous acts (like Wakdjunkaga who sometimes eats children). It is the greyed-haired baby that will appear at moments of stalemate ‘to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again’ (Hyde, 1998: 7). But while tricksters masquerade as saviours (Szakolczai and Thomassen, 2019: 220), mediators of conflicts and instruments of social justice, their motives for choosing between good and bad remain obscure. An apparent underdog, the trickster intimates a form of control that leaves open whether its accomplishments happen by accident or whether it is in fact remarkably clever, ‘exacting justice in a way that leaves him immune to punishment’ (Kononenko and Kukharenko, 2008: 9). A temporary spell in power, which is often a fundamental part of trickster tales in folklore, makes it at once hegemonic and subversive, and thus ‘a symbol of doubleness’ (Landay, 1998: 11). Tricksters hold up a mirror to society, in which the adequacy, or lack thereof, of its moral coordinates is reflected. Like any satire, trickstery symbolically inverts hierarchies and destabilises seemingly stable structures, providing an opening for reform, and does so ‘by means of a lie that is really a truth, a deception that is in fact a revelation’ (Hyde, 1998: 71). Still, by constantly blurring distinctions between truth and lie, tricksters perpetuate anguish rather than inspire social liberation.

Transformation of tricks into art

The central modality of cunning trickster knowledge is mimetic and thus close to art, so it can be perceived particularly well in artistic performances (Babcock-Abrahams, 1975: 182; Szakolczai and Thomassen, 2019: 237). By transforming imitation into ‘a non-pragmatic art of transgressive life’, Soviet tricksters, for example, embody ‘a cultural justification for dangerous, non-heroic and cynical survival’ (Lipovetsky, 2015: 44). Being brazen is as important as being practical, hence tricksters may sometimes sacrifice the latter. As any social actor in a strategic environment, tricksters calculate and modify their behaviour in light of experience (Babcock-Abrahams, 1975: 181), but their commitment is to the thrill of the game, even as opponents call their bluff and the daredevil spirit wreaks havoc on the trickster itself.

Tricksters, in other words, straddle performative and pragmatic rationality, not reducible to any established logic of action (as known to IR) but imitating elements of most: They seek gains and are attuned to the norms structuring their environments (cf. logic of consequences and appropriateness in March and Olsen, 1998), a skill which is necessary to purposefully ‘overidentify’ with norms. They may engage in dialogue (cf. logic of communication in Risse, 2000) despite their ambiguous positionality in any such conversation and a lack of confidence in the underlying principles. And they act out (cf. logic of practicality in Pouliot, 2008) as much as reflect on their action. The performative rationality consists in acts which are not confined within one plane but come about instead ‘in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference’ (Koestler, 1970: 51). Such acts are ‘double-minded, transitory state[s] of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed’ (Koestler, 1970: 51). However, since frames of reference are never fully identical for different groups and individuals, trickstery is rooted in a local web of signification, and the chosen frames are habitually incompatible, such acts are always at risk of missing the mark.

Liminality

The trickster resides ‘betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, customs, conventions, and ceremonial’, as Victor Turner ([1969] 1991: 95) famously put it in respect to the concept of liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning ‘a threshold’ [see Lewis and Short, 1879]). Liminality describes the state of disorientation and ambiguity in the middle stage of a rite of passage when participants are rid of previous ways of structuring their identity and community but have not yet integrated into new ones (Turner, 1974). The trickster is a product and agent of such disorientation, which gives it a partially outsider and ever floating status, and a particular kind of agency. The trickster cannot excel when playing by the system’s rules, but instead utilises systemic contradictions against the system itself and introduces:

antistructural elements into the social and cultural order and expos[es] and creat[es] liminal zones within existing hierarchies and stratifications. His principle is not inversion but deconstruction, the undermining of the system by means of revealing and subverting its logic, a dissembling that comes not from outside but from within, from a point betwixt and between. (Lipovetsky, 2011: 32, emphasis original)

There are two sides to such liminal subjectivity. On the one hand, liminality turns a structured, hierarchically organised society into an unstructured or loosely structured community of equal individuals (or communitas, as Turner prefers to call it). In terms of the trickster’s dynamics we identify in international society, such occasions produce a heightened sense of freedom from the straitjacket of conventions wherein social norms can be negotiated and potentially transgressed, thus creating openings that endow trickstery with a powerful egalitarian potential. But liminal moments, on the other hand, are not necessarily something new or transformative, being more like anguishing situations of uncertainty (Szakolczai and Thomassen, 2019: 231). Liminal conditions are openings that permit throwing doubt on any patterns of action. The trickster does this by utilising those patterns in a (parodically) mimetic way. Because it creates by subverting and repurposing, rather than rejecting or simply explicitly mocking existing categories, its political creativity, and transgression, are circumscribed. The trickster remains embedded in the structures of power. The promise of a real alternative remains only ever as a lingering implication.

Relation to the sacred

Tricksters’ relation to the sacred is what distinguishes them from simple crooks (Lipovetsky, 2011: 33); however, this is a peculiar relation. The trickster’s divine pedigree is constantly questioned, while still bounded with its being the second founder of the world (Szakolczai and Thomassen, 2019: 137). Not the original deity figure, the trickster remains the second creator, ‘thus playing a fundamental role in altering the original order of reality’ (Szakolczai and Thomassen, 2019: 137). The trickster’s deification thus derives from the connectedness to the origin of its cultural system and the grasp the trickster has of the dependence of that order on the reproduction of social cohesion, which allows it to challenge that order through tricks. Its sacred dimension also originates in the status of ‘the official ritual profaner of beliefs’ (Hynes, 1993: 37) that violates taboos on behalf of the community and makes a sacrifice of itself so that, ultimately, social order may triumph (Babcock-Abrahams, 1975: 164; Makarius, 1993: 72–73).

Trickstery: a situational script

The trickster is thus a secondary founding member of a cultural milieu whose expertise derives from knowing the system thoroughly but whose capacity to initiate and promote radical change is circumscribed. The workings of the trickster escape an exclusively structuralist-functionalist perspective (Szakolczai and Thomassen, 2019: 243, 137) because trickstery relates to liminal moments which are ‘transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous’ (Detienne and Vernant, 1978: 3) and thus do not lend themselves to ‘precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic’ (Detienne and Vernant, 1978: 4). The trickster’s currency depends on the situation, and, as a shape-shifter, it will not hesitate to change opinions, pretending never to have espoused a previous standpoint. As a plural figure, the trickster effectuates actions which can be both disorienting and reorienting, politicising and depoliticising, so it is not possible to establish in advance what new institutions it may inspire and/or what old hierarchies it will re-establish (cf. Weber, 2016: 21). In its intelligibility, trickstery produces a diverse range of representations and interpretations; for example, as ominous and damaging for the consensual international order; as a desirable exposure, or even cure, for the hypocrisies that such order is based upon; or simply as one political tactic among many.⁹

There is obvious affinity between humour and trickstery. Both are serious matters as they carry potential for complex forms of coercion (Weitz, 2011) and context is crucial for making sense of them. Our Conclusion considers the role of humour in terms of ideology while here we want to signal analytical commonalities. Both require cultural and temporal sensitivity, work differently across groups and have locally specific genre variations that do not necessarily travel. Both ‘need an echo’ (Bergson, [1911] 2005: 3), that is, they depend on audience and its reception, and contain ‘a drop of adrenaline’ (Kuipers, 2006: 248), that is, an element of a risky displacement (cf. Koestler, 1970: 51) whose effect cannot be assured until the echo is heard. This calls for an ex post semiotic analysis of social action, including speech, informed by hermeneutical sensibility. To paraphrase Charles Taylor, such sensibility makes sense of the meaning of the situation for an actor, which does not need to be rational or coherent for the observer, while an adequate depiction of such contradictions does provide an interpretive explanation (Taylor, 1979: 35; cf. Soss, 2006).

Russia as a trickster in international society

Russia’s permanent membership in the UN Security Council is a legacy of the post-World War II international order in the establishment of which Russia played a foundational role and within which it assumed special responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. And yet for many authors Russia occupies an ambiguous liminal position in this community. It is seen, for example, as both ‘part of’ and ‘apart from’ Europe (Baranovsky, 2000). Such ambivalence has been studied at length, classically in Iver Neumann’s portrayal of Russia as a perennial learner whose breaking of the international society rules is somewhat to be expected (Neumann, 1999; Neumann and Pouliot, 2011). Within the logic of Neumann’s seminal study, ‘the East has been cut loose from its geographical point of reference and has become a generalized social marker in European identity formation’ (Neumann, 1999: 207) that prevails regardless of the efforts of the political actors deemed ‘Eastern’. This is a form of stigmatisation, a process central to the constitution of international society in which some actors, attributes or behaviours are marked as ‘deviant’ in order to reinforce the norms of a given society.

Stigmatisation is what makes the world hang together (Zarakol, 2014) in that it is necessary in order to understanding how norms work (Adler-Nissen, 2014: 144). Within the de facto hierarchisation that generates normative stratification across formally equal states (cf. Mattern and Zarakol, 2016; Reus-Smit, 2005), Russia’s positionality is, however, plural and pluralising—’plural,’ to be clear, meaning not that it is accommodating and ecumenical but, rather, that it is characterised by the performance of multiple ostensibly contradictory logics simultaneously. On the one hand, and as Neumann discusses, Russia can never quite make the cut into the civilised league (Neumann, 1999: 112). Yet, on the other, as ‘a secondary creator’ of international society, with a history of hegemonic spells in establishing hierarchies in this society and a record of subjugations of its own, Russia also pluralises the binary logic of being either deviant or normal, an oppressor or the subaltern, a champion of the downtrodden or a selfish brute or buffoon. By repurposing existing normative frameworks and domestic cultural traditions, the trickster both upsets and reconfirms existing normative coordinates.

Zarakol (2011) and Morozov (2015) capture, although from different perspectives, important conditions of possibility for what we call Russia’s trickstery in international society. Russia enjoys partial integration into the symbolic and institutional order. Zarakol delineates the historical process that contributed to such liminal condition: Russia’s incorporation into the Westphalian system, similar to the Ottoman and the Japanese empires, came with the stigma of having to accept ‘a self-negating position of an outsider’ (Zarakol, 2011: 10). This liminality refers less to a period of transition towards full membership and more to a systemic ambivalence resulting from not being able to achieve such status, on any foreseeable timeline. Morozov (2015) complicates this picture at the regional level where Russia actively stigmatises its neighbours yet remains imprisoned to its own (self-)stigmatisation as being ‘othered’ by the West. The concept of trickstery, and the notion of Russia as a trickster, pluralises such processes of stigmatisation by introducing the and/or logic.

Trickstery and pluralisation

Weber (2016) uses the example of the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest winner Tom Neuwirth and/as Conchita Wurst as a figure who, depending on normative fault lines, embodied either a normal or a perverse image in the project of an integrated Europe. She argues instead for an and/or figuration that defies such binary categorisation. Intriguingly, something similar happened at the same contest the following year: When the 2015 Eurovision voting took place—after Crimea was annexed and international sanctions placed on Russia—the entertainer Dmitriy Shepelev proudly announced, on behalf of the Russian voting committee, that ‘twelve points from Russia go to. . . Russia!’,¹⁰ with a big laugh. (Under Eurovision rules, a state cannot vote for itself.) With the joke, Shepelev confronts his audience with a number of contradictions: by participating he embraces the membership in the Eurovision community, but he also blatantly breaks the community’s code of conduct in a jester-like manner, satirising the expectation that Russia will inevitably do so and thus showing the community its own ‘Russophobia’.¹¹ Shepelev is not a state actor, and the Eurovision is not constitutive of international society per se. However, this contest is an influential forum for the construction of international identities, and, moreover, this particular act of jester-like subversion can be taken as emblematic of the cultural complex that Russian trickstery draws from.

Shepelev the joker is not unlike Neuwirth/Wurst who pluralises the binary of the normal versus perverse. His joke works at least in part because he plays with Russia’s ‘misrecognition’ through an expert use of rules about recognition that he simultaneously abides by and satirises. He embraces the status of the stigmatised to both instrumentalise and deride it, intimating the legitimacy of the subjugated. Here stigma acceptance and rejection, as well as an implicit contra which comes through an act rather than as a discursive articulation, meet in one performance. The stigma is indeed reconfirmed, the hosts of the Eurovision rolling their eyes in feigned embarrassment. But it is also ever so slightly undermined in that the performance produces a discord, an effect in line with Butler’s concept of performativity (Butler, 1999): social categories are produced by being inhabited and enacted, yet ‘because each enactment is itself particular, it holds the possibility of reworking, rewiring, and resisting’ (Weber, 2016: 16). Such rewirings, however, can neither be fully concocted nor predicted. As hypothesised by Zarakol (2011: 223), the stigmatised actor may exploit stigma ‘either as a way of gaining influence among the community of the even more stigmatized, or as a characteristic which demands special accommodation’, and we trace these exploitations in the vignettes that follow. But the performative rationality of the trickster problematises the strategy of stigma exploitation: the importance of the dramatic effect of satirising the stigma, its theatricality, collapses the dichotomy between strategic action and artistic performance.

There are two conditions in particular that facilitate pluralisation embodied by tricksters. First, liminal situations, as temporary dissolutions of order, are a form of test (Szakolczai and Thomassen, 2019: 231), as the notion of the rite of passage indicates. Tricksters are those who have failed the test. Unlike other participants of the rites de passage, who re-integrate into the social routine and accept normalised hierarchical stratification, the trickster not only keeps the memory of the foundational moment but also purposefully seeks to proliferate confusion for its own gain (Horváth and Szakolczai, 2020: 19–20). Moulded ‘betwixt and between’, tricksters acquire specific talents to operate in and through disorder while also cultivating a resentment about this positionality, ‘a [grudge] against everyone and everything’ (Szakolczai and Thomassen, 2019: 145). The trickster logic thus becomes central to action when the community enters normative flux – that is, stratifications are being troubled, and the community may be going through upheavals.

The second condition underlying pluralising stigma is ‘a theatricalisation of the social’ (Szakolczai, 2015), including the international social. The trickster uses liminal spaces to ‘stage his transgressive “theatre” in which ‘everything solid [transforms] into the apotheosis of ambivalence’” (Lipovetsky, 2015: 44). Drawing on the writings of Erving Goffman, scholarship on stigma in IR explores the question of ‘spoilt identity’ (Goffman, 1963) and its management, which incorporates the assumption that identities can be overtly displayed in both cynical and sincere ways. However, such scholarship pays less attention to ‘the theatre of it’ (Goffman, 1959), an act which contains the potential to both reinstate and implode the normative order. Such theatricality draws on cultural particularities and shares affinity with satire – a culturally situated mode of performance and unstable rhetoric of provocation with socially divisive effects (Meijer Drees and Leeuw, 2015: 3).

Overidentification

As trickstery is woven from cultural particularities, there is no one trickster language. The notion of Russia as a trickster relates to a particular kind of satire, the dissident aesthetics of stiob, which flourished in the late-Soviet socialism (Boyer and Yurchak, 2010: 182). Stiob differed from ‘sarcasm, cynicism, derision or any of the more familiar genres of absurd humour’ in that it ‘required such a degree of overidentification with the object, person, or idea at which [it] was directed that it was often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two’ (Yurchak, 2005: 250). Stiob sought to subvert the dominant Soviet values by pretending and demanding earnest compliance with these values. Overidentification here signifies obedience and defiance at the same time, obscuring the boundary between authority and subservience. Overidentification is also a performative act in that it instantaneously reproduces and undermines a category, with a subject both determined by and imploding that category by inhabiting it. This ‘dialectic at a standstill’ (Walter Benjamin cited in Boym, 2005: 585)¹² operates as an artistic trick of merging two ‘self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference’ (Koestler, 1970: 51) – that is, by a simultaneous endorsement of the official ideology’s content and style and undermining this ideology by exploiting its own language in the genre of the underground aesthetics.¹³

This dissident aesthetics, initially devised as a social critique in the context of the dominant Soviet discourse, re-emerges as a means of making liberal norms an object of travesty, both domestically and internationally. The appropriation is part of a broader phenomenon of ‘the state’s annexation of transgression’, as Kukulin (2018) observes, wherein official state figures adopt transgressive performances characteristic of contemporary art, spanning the public sphere towards ‘messianic cynicism’. In an earlier analysis of the Russian blogosphere, we identify a similar trend in pro-Kremlin trolling that hijacks the originally anti-systemic character of trolling for the purposes of shielding the regime (Kurowska and Reshetnikov, 2018). The industrialised online satire overidentifies with civic activism and freedom of expression and renders bona fide political communication absurd, including anti-regime mobilisation. Subversive compliance with a normative framework through duplicitous overidentification also makes it mark in the Russian diplomatic practice.

The invocation by Russia of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P)¹⁴ to justify its military interventions in Georgia and Ukraine, for example, has been characterised as satire (Dunn and Bobick, 2014) and norm parody (Burai, 2016). An imitation of the Western normative script, overidentification in our parlance, seeks to create an equivalence between the actions of international community and Russia’s interventions wherein Russia is ‘simultaneously provocateur, enabler, aggressor, and peacemaker’ (Dunn and Bobick, 2014: 410), and so is, apparently, the equally realpolitik-motivated international community. This parodic appropriation of the Western normative script, as Burai (2016: 67) argues, has a destabilising impact on global norms. Interventions in the Security Council by the late Russian representative to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, who was known for a trolling turn of phrase, illustrate such use of stiob in diplomacy. Churkin referred to R2P to claim that Georgia had failed to carry out the responsibility to protect its citizens in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. For this purpose, he invoked what is known as the first pillar of R2P, which indeed establishes such state responsibility as primary and is best understood as ‘a reaffirmation and codification of already existing norms’ (Bellamy, 2010: 160). His formalistic identification with international norms serves to signal normative compliance, while enactment of parody exposes contradictions in the liberal order and thus potentially upsets its normative hold:

Now it is clear why, for many months, Georgia rejected our urgent proposal that it sign a legally binding document on the non-use of force to settle the South Ossetian conflict . . . The President of Georgia said that demanding his signature on such a document was absurd because Georgia does not use force against its own people. Now it appears that it does. How can we not recall the responsibility to protect that we hear so much about in the United Nations? (Security Council UN, 2008: 5).

This statement exhibits the hallmarks of trickstery. In overidentification, norms are invoked and endorsed but their ontological status, their content and thus their legitimacy, are implicitly questioned and possibly derided in the very act of invocation. Russia overtly presents itself as a devout adherent to international norms, but also makes a theatrical spectacle of such norms, a hijacked strategy of dissidence which proliferates normative confusion and anguish. The effects are ambivalent. The original normative discourse is shown to be just one possible ‘reality-making script’ (Burai, 2016), an arbitrary category as any other human artefact, which can be reformed. Calls for strict compliance put on public display the structural hegemony and quotidian hypocrisy of those liberal actors who profess but routinely breach liberal norms. In performing an equivalence between the action of Western humanitarians and Russia’s defence of its compatriots abroad, liberal norms are being drained of moral force. As a supplement to direct confrontation, parodic overidentification reveals cracks in the ideological edifice of the liberal order and thus contests that order.

Russia’s justification of its veto against any new Security Council resolutions condoning the Syrian regime’s atrocities and the use of chemical weapons is likewise marred in moral ambivalence, while it performs indignation with artistic flair, occasionally ending in mockery.¹⁵ Russia simultaneously expresses unconditional support for the international regime of non-proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), the commitment to protect peace and security, and accuses Western experts of partiality and politicisation, effectively questioning the legitimacy of the non-proliferation effort. In their fervent public performances, Russian diplomats promote themselves as the proper guardians of international law, sparking a politics of disorder. Western diplomats label Russia’s practices as ‘a dual strategy of obstruction and diversion’, as fantasy and fiction, and generally as playing games and wasting everybody’s time (Security Council UN, 2018: 17, 21). The go-to explanation, also voiced in such exchanges, is to refer to the spoiler’s tactics aimed at protecting the Assad regime. But why go to such great lengths to support a mediocre dictator if the consequences involve grave reputational damage, further stigmatisation and loss of credibility as a responsible P5 power, a status which Russia otherwise cherishes? Why tarnish the legitimacy of the Security Council if the institution is the last remaining marker of Russia’s great power status, and why endanger the international regime of non-proliferation that Russia takes pride in co-establishing? Why expose oneself to international mockery? In the two vignettes that follow, we analyse instances of trickstery that collapse pragmatic and performative rationality and consider what effects this may bring. Thus, Russia’s apparently old-school retribution against defecting spies meshes with a pseudo-transparent and media-centred attempt to save face that ends in a farce. Russia’s self-serving advocacy of the sovereign Internet overlaps with its critique of global inequality where the appeal to cultural diversity, enshrined in the UN Charter, serves to undermine legitimacy of the global governance of the Internet. These are two habitual scenarios from the trickster’s lifecycle: the negative consequences of overreach that rebound upon tricksters when they become carried away with the game (the espionage story) and elegant fakery that yields results in an intense ideological struggle (the cyber resolution case).

The RT interview

While trickstery comes in many guises, instances where Russia as a trickster brings derision upon itself are particularly puzzling. Political actors usually try to avoid reputational calamities, so purposeful self-embarrassments in politics are rare, and humour is usually utilised to safeguard an actor’s reputation. Tricksters, in contrast, thrive on ambivalent performances and are accustomed to failure that may result in mockery. They resort to tactics that predictably cause ridicule, which might have been avoided had the actor abstained from the original provocation. A quintessential example of such self-inflicted mockery was the RT interview with ‘Boshirov’ and ‘Petrov’, suspects in the Skripal affair (RT, 2018).

To briefly reconstruct the circumstances of the interview, on 4 March 2018 retired Russian officer and double agent Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury, UK. They were found slipping in and out of consciousness on a public bench in the city centre. The British police established that they had been exposed to Novichok, a nerve agent originally developed in the Soviet Union. Following a six-month investigation, the police released the names and photos of two suspects, Ruslan Boshirov and Aleksander Petrov, Russian citizens and presumably agents of the Main Directorate of the General Headquarters of the Russian Armed Forces (aka GRU), likely acting under aliases. Confronted in September 2018 with the UK accusation, President Putin publicly urged these individuals to come forward (Smirnov, 2018). And come forward they did, giving an exclusive interview to the pro-Kremlin channel RT, which, it is widely admitted, descended into a farce (RT, 2018; Slonim, 2018). In the RT exclusive interview, the alleged poisoners raised alarm about violations of their privacy by the foreign intelligence agencies and claimed that they had been to Salisbury as regular tourists to visit Salisbury Cathedral’s famous 123-metre spire, the tallest in the UK. The suspects apparently chose, or were told, to confront the challenge head-on, claiming ignorance and innocence of the crime, and appealing to the standard set of liberal values, including the rights to privacy and free movement. As both men hurried to attest (literally finishing each other’s sentences) after RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan pointed out that they ‘look[ed] tense’, any normal¹⁶ human being would look tense ‘if [their] life was turned upside down in one day and completely broken’. They also insisted they went to the UK to achieve largely consumerist goals, very familiar to the Western audience: ‘to get poshed up’ (otorvat’sya) in London and to see Salisbury, a ‘wonderful . . . touristic city . . . famous not only in England but in the whole world’.

Similarly, when Simonyan decided to follow up on the suspects’ self-presentation as ‘normal [i.e. straight] men’ (normal’nye muzhiki) by asking why they always travelled and walked together, as well as shared one room, thereby insinuating their possibly homosexual liaison, ‘Boshirov’ took issue with her approach and asked ‘not to snoop into their personal life’, thus leaving ample space for interpretation and potential empathy from the liberal crowd. Altogether, ‘Boshirov’ and ‘Petrov’ tried hard to assume a similitude of quintessential representatives of the neoliberal order: ‘ordinary second-rate entrepreneurs’ (bisnesmeny sredney ruki) dealing in nutrient additives and following the current trends in ‘healthy lifestyle and diet’, who are well-travelled in Europe, having their business tightly integrated into the global context, and who ‘only want to be left alone’ (repeated six times during the interview). Their performance, however, was utterly unconvincing.

The interview drew much attention. Bellingcat Investigation Team (2018a, b, c), an investigative journalism website, published a series of investigations in which ‘Boshirov’ and ‘Petrov’ were identified as colonel Anatoly Chepiga and military doctor Aleksander Mishkin, both of military background and allegedly honoured with the Hero of Russia titles. These investigations not only damaged Chepiga and Mishkin but also badly affected a segment of the Russian foreign intelligence apparatus. Journalists discovered patterns in the fabrication of the two men’s aliases, which threatened a potential exposure of numerous other individuals working for GRU. Chepiga and Mishkin became in the meantime instant memes, ridiculed as clumsy and not very intelligent intelligence officers to domestic (Slepakov, 2018) and international (Davies, 2018) audiences.

Given Russia does not extradite its own citizens, why arrange for such an interview? Why produce an implausibly tall tale, with predictably disastrous effects? Why choose RT to air the interview rather than a more tightly controlled Russian federal TV channel whose audience may not have doubted the veracity of the interview? While certainly pro-Kremlin in its agenda, RT seeks a radically critical image of unmasking the fraudulence of the West and nourishes subversive disposition of its audience, domestically and internationally. For such an audience, regardless of its political stance, the interview predictably came off as a sham (Chatterje-Doody and Rhys, 2018). While the story makes sense from within the trickster position as an instance of duplicitous overidentification that seemingly backfired, there are alternative explanations. It may, for instance, have been a blunder by the GRU, known for its outdated methods and troubled institutional history (Turovsky, 2018). Pro-regime elites may have abandoned any desire to conform to international norms and rules, using every opportunity to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the Western international order, and seeking to undermine and transform it into something more to Russia’s liking (Krastev and Leonard, 2015). Finally, the self-inflicted farce may have something to do with the nostalgia for the soothing certainty of the Cold War (Kashin, 2018). In this context, and given the current geopolitical situation, a few easily procured scandals can provoke the West to foot the bill for a costly process of constructing barriers.

These are not satisfying explanations. First, however troubled the GRU may be, the interview required complex coordination and superiors’ approval. It was pre-recorded rather than broadcast live and aired after Putin urged the tourists to come out. Both RT and the Presidential Administration are committed to, and professional about, presenting Russia in the most favourable light. It is thus unlikely that those actors would have collectively agreed that the performance was a good idea had they not been embracing, to some extent, the trickster’s rationality. From within such rationality, bluff is part of the game, so long as it yields results. The trickster is not constrained by moral conventions, although it is always ready to don the mask of wide-eyed innocence. The mask may then express righteous indignation that resonates with dominant cultural values, yet it hides de facto indifference towards these values, since they are, in the trickster’s register, contingent.

Second, while it is obvious that Russia is dissatisfied with the current constellation of forces in the global order,¹⁷ there are different ways to contest the status quo, both in terms of style and content. The options include, for example, constructive critique, transgressive isolationist rhetoric or a revolutionary alternative. Contestation can be performed in a traditional diplomatic style; however, Russia opts instead for irony, trolling (Zakharova, 2018), and outright impudence (Schreck, 2017). These are transgressive rhetorical genres practiced by liminal cultural figures who cannot afford to engage in bona fide arguments because their marginalised position excludes engagement on equal terms. The egalitarian force of trickstery serves to level the playing field by means other than traditional diplomacy. The trickster demonstrates cultural competence, as well as a profound understanding of the system and of the importance of social cohesion for its reproduction. However, it also intimates that such knowledge does not fully constrain its action. Morally and intellectually flexible, tricksters can afford to play with the constraints of existing structures and hierarchies. Yet it requires both skill and talent, as well as social capital, to play a trickster in style, of course. So, what is permissible for Lavrov (Porter, 2008), for instance, is a stretch too far for Safronkov.¹⁸ And what works for Shoygu, tears ‘Petrov’ and ‘Boshirov’ to tatters.

Finally, while the interview serves as ad hoc crisis management, it offers no new standards for espionage, truth management or international order, which aligns with tricksters’ predisposition towards short-term schemes and plots. A trickster is not a creator of any alternative substantive ideology. Russia’s subversions, such as the one carried out by ‘Boshirov’ and ‘Petrov,’ occur against the background of its eager and deep-rooted integration into the capitalist world order (Etkind, 2016). Tricksters subvert out of a revelation that any order is artificial and contingent at its very core. They act as if they were participating in an unending rite of passage. In the story of ‘Boshirov’ and ‘Petrov,’ Russia as a trickster, first, breaks taboos and ridicules the dominant norms, remaining, at the same time, their natural product and a carrier of their genealogy; second, Russia also gets outwitted by the complexity of the existing structures and practices, as the mythical trickster must. It is not only that ‘Boshirov’ and ‘Petrov’ proved to be poor actors without social capital of seasoned performers, they (and Russia) also underestimated the extent of UK surveillance and overestimated the ability of GRU to cover up their agents’ digital traces. Thereby, Russia reveals its seemingly malicious, but, in fact, relatively conformist and feeble systemic disposition.

The UN resolution

Russia has been at the forefront of UN attempts to regulate the global governance of the Internet since 1998 (cf. Kurowska, 2020). It initiated, in particular, the UN process called the Group of Governmental Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security (UN GGE). Launched in 2004, UN GEE initially included 15, and then up to 25, experts, and produced three reports communicated to the UN General Assembly in 2010, 2013 and 2015. The reports are not legally binding, but they have become the main point of reference in state and regional regulation of the Internet. They prompted headways towards a global consensus that, first, international law applies in cyberspace, and, second, that there are standards of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace, even as the meaning of both remains contentious. The steady work of the UN GGE came to a halt in 2017 when it failed to agree on another joint report, later attributed by the Russian head cyber diplomat, Andrey Krutskikh, to Western experts’ monopolisation of the leadership of the group.¹⁹ In that moment, the rift between the West and ‘the rest’ over Internet governance became clearly demarcated: Russia, together with China and the members of the Common Security Treaty Organisation, stand for the regulation of cyberspace based on the principle of sovereignty of states and non-interference in a country’s internal affairs. The US, EU, Canada, Australia and others, a group which calls itself ‘the like-minded group’, promote regulation based on the idea of ‘free, open, and secure Internet’ and seek to contain the legalisation of censorship and expansion of governmental control over the Internet.

On 5 December 2018, the UN General Assembly adopted a Russia-sponsored resolution (General Assembly UN, 2018b) that upends the UN process and marks a liminal situation where the trickster’s logic breaks through. The resolution, first, reinstates those provisions of the UN Charter, which enshrine respect for cultural and historical diversity of states and insists on the equal role and responsibility of all UN member states in Internet governance, irrespective of their technological development. Second, it launches the Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG), a format which calls for the participation of the entire UN membership in decision-making over the design of global governance of the Internet, as a parallel, levelling and possibly dissenting forum to the UN GGE, and one with greater legitimacy thanks to its representativeness. The resolution arguably manifests a liminal stage in the history of cyber diplomacy, a challenge to the power relations, values and institutions that governed cyberspace since its initial development, indicating a shift from the liberal to postliberal order (cf. Barrinha and Renard, 2020); in other words, a rite of passage that poses a test to a community in flux.

Recorded deliberations over the final draft of the Russia-sponsored resolution in the UN General Assembly’s First Committee on disarmament, global challenges and threats to peace on 8 November 2018 (for the draft resolution see General Assembly, 2018c) show the trickster in action. The session features Russia’s passionate advocacy of equality and democracy in international society, which puts the members of the ‘the like-minded group’ on the defensive; the liberal proponents of the global Internet governance end up justifying structural inequality. Trickstery brings them to confirm what they are accused of. None of the actors is left holding a high moral ground, a relativising feature of trickstery. Russia starts its exposé with a baffling (given its founding role), but characteristic of the shape-shifting trickster, denunciation of the UN GGE. It proceeds by overidentifying with the norm of sovereign equality:

The practice of some club agreements should be sent into the annals of history. All states, irrespective of their technological development, have the full right to directly participate in negotiation on International Information Security within the UN and thus influence decision-making. (Disarmament and International Security Committee, 2018).²⁰

‘The like-minded group’ reacts by protesting against such framings and intimates that Russia only spoils and confuses the process. The EU representative declares, for example, that ‘[b]y referring selectively and without prior agreement to the recommendations of the previous consensus reports of the UN GGE, [the initiative to launch the OEWG] prejudges the substantive outcomes of any consultative process’.²¹ The US, Canada and Australia express in different guises their disappointment with Russia’s ‘change of heart’ and distorting the meaning of past agreements. This coordinated counter-denunciation cannot, however, redress the fact that the text of the Russia-sponsored resolution could be both a statement of exemplary support of sovereign equality, thus furthering the cause of democratisation in international society, and a form of ridicule which takes resistance to liberal hegemony to another level. Effectively cornered by trickstery, ‘the like-minded group’ strikes back against charges of hegemony by demonstrating its own hegemonic imaginaries. They collectively, and in hardly varying vocabulary, suggest that the OEWG should remain only a consultative mechanism for the UN GGE; and they emphasise instead investment in cyber capacity building to bring the technologically and legally dawdling countries to the level of the international standards. Russia’s passionate performance that condemns the UN GGE as a means of maintaining digital inequality is ‘a deception that is in fact a revelation’ (Hyde, 1998: 71). It is a trick by a seasoned and a (self-)ostracised community member who knows how to seize an opportunity.

Not an unheard of diplomatic manoeuvre, the move draws its effect from a particular constellation of international society wherein Russia acts as, simultaneously, a ‘cultural hero’ levelling hierarchies on behalf of the marginalised in the cyberspace and a ‘selfish buffoon’ that blurs the very sense of distinction between truth and lies. It thus escalates divisions, for the instrumental gain of undermining legitimacy of the process that Russia cannot control anymore, and for the ‘theatre of it’. Theatricalisation is intrinsic to usurping the role of a saviour that is half-interested in solving the crisis. The moral ambiguity and flexibility of the trickster is on display. Russia’s declared mission of curbing Western hegemony both addresses and exploits genuine inequality in international society, as liminality is also a source of potentially emancipatory reshufflings. The championing of global norms exposes stratification as contingent and hegemonic, while the call for normative purity, with a wink, also, however, potentially discredits the cause for democratisation. The application of a dissident strategy increases and freezes uncertainty and discord embedded in the possible rite of passage from a liberal to postliberal international order. The consequences of this action are yet to be determined. Unofficially, Russian diplomats are reported to admit their awareness of the highly ‘unwieldy’ character of the OEWG,²² which may undermine the UN process of Internet regulation. The combination of full public openness advocated in connection with the OEWG and absolute secrecy where the ‘power brokers’ can plot traditionally belongs to the trickster’s modus operandi (Szakolczai and Thomassen, 2019: 237). It also describes long-standing practices of Soviet and Russian diplomacy, which is invested in belonging to the club of powerful states that strike deals among themselves. In this context, if the OEWG turns out to be a political opening akin to ‘a cyber-agora’ that democratises the global governance of the Internet, Russia may have scored an own goal, as tricksters do.

Conclusion

Trickstery points to a ‘dialectic of dissent’ by the stigmatised, which is also a form of reproduction of oppression by the stigmatising. The allure of disorienting and/or reorienting plural figures (again, ‘plural’ in the sense of accommodating apparently contradictory logics of behaviour, not in the sense of liberal accommodation of differences) is normatively hazardous as it appeals to both those who ‘wish to resist hegemonic relations of power and those who wish to sustain them’ (Weber, 2016: 22). Trickstery can be seductive for the political imaginary that hopes to reorient normative stratifications. However, in revealing norms as contingent frameworks, tricksters draw an equivalence between emancipatory transgressions and authoritarian force – a radical disorientation.

What new political forms can trickstery produce, then, and what can be gained from taking on such a complex concept? We elaborated above how situations of liminality, that is, of transition and normative flux, instigate the logic of trickstery, and that certain types of positionality and cultural reservoirs make for better tricksters, although their performance remains precarious and their script situational. Tricksters can consolidate their power by purposefully ‘magnifying the flux’ (Horváth and Szakolczai, 2020: 4) towards uncertainty in which they appropriate the role of champions of freedom. Tricksters are the Trumps of our times (cf. Sligo, 2018). When such negative dimensions of the trickster’s action become central to diplomatic practice, prank, anguish and confusion form the currency of international interaction. This radically diminishes the classical function of diplomacy as ‘the mediation of estrangement’ (Der Derian, 1987). Whether Russia as a trickster is in the avant-garde of such changes in diplomatic communication, or it is an imitator in a larger shift towards theatricalisation of international society, is worth exploring.

The concept of the trickster as inspired by the notion of plural figures has distinct potentialities. Most immediately, the concept complicates the either/or logic that singularises subjects for analytical and normative purposes, here most specifically as regards the question of whether Russia is or is not a stigmatised figure and whether it stigmatises itself or is stigmatised by the West. The concept speaks instead to a research agenda that explores political possibilities which are not immediately evident, analyses tensions in lived political phenomena rather than trying to resolve them, and reconciles with the embeddedness of any action in ideologies and thus with the futility of mono-normative analysis. Such theoretical and methodological insights are difficult to sustain within any framework. They are also vulnerable for being captured by unsavoury political projects, as the case of transgressive art appropriated by Russia as a trickster illustrates well. One of the most interesting questions in this context is: Why bother if no one believes Russia’s trickstery?

In Ambiguities of Domination, Lisa Wedeen asked why bother with rituals of obeisance which are transparently phoney – in her case, Asad’s personality cult in Syria (Wedeen, 1999). What kind of work do flagrantly fatuous claims do? The immediate answer here is fear, as failure to engage even in the blatantly fake mode that was the only mode (and everyone knew it) had severe consequences. Yet a politics of public dissimulation of as if reverence also exercised a more subtle and insidious control over the society, eroding solidarity and the public sphere (Wedeen, 1998). The role of humour remains undecided here and may well signify depoliticisation (cf. Adler-Nissen and Tsinovoi, 2019). Humour weaves together disciplinary and emancipatory possibilities wherein estrangement from the established order creates political openings but it also supports the working of ideology, even if in fragmentary ways (Wedeen, 2013: 863–864). The politics of trickstery brings undecidability to the level of international society, marking distinct normative challenges.

Russian theatrical overidentification is not trusted in international society, yet it spawns ambivalent parameters of action that stick. Russia as a trickster has not established its own credibility as an innovative and inclusive global Internet regulator, for example. But it has brought to even sharper relief the unrepresentativeness of global arrangements it had co-constituted. This cast doubt on the credibility of others and their good faith, undermining the legitimacy of multilateral, if no doubt hierarchical, institutions, the way dissident art challenged the legitimacy of the late-Soviet regime. Taken to the realm of international society, trickstery instigates a politics of ambivalence and suspended judgement. If, within such parameters, everyone appears corrupt and political mobilisation is discredited, this is hardly a democratic opening.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their generous engagement with our article. A number of people read and offered comments and we would like to acknowledge in particular Ayse Zarakol, Iver Neumann, Viacheslav Morozov, Stefanie Ortmann, Erica Simone Almeida Resende, Benjamin Tallis, Alexander Graef, Stephanie Hofmann, Adrian Rogstad, Milja Kurki, Catherine Owen and Yoav Galai, as well as graduate students in the seminar on security theory taught at Central European University by Xymena Kurowska in the winter of 2019/20. In the last round of revisions, Philip Conway, Felix Ciuta and Christopher LaRoche provided extensive and witty advice and commentary that helped us finalise the manuscript.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Xymena Kurowska

Notes

Author biographies

Xymena Kurowska is Associate Professor of International Relations at Central European University. She received her doctorate in social and political sciences from European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She works within International Political Sociology.

Anatoly Reshetnikov is Assistant Professor of International Relations Webster Vienna Private University. He holds a PhD from the Department of International Relations of the Central European University (Hungary). He has been a Visiting Researcher at the University College London (UK) and Lund University (Sweden) and a grantee of the Swedish Institute, as well as the CEU Budapest Foundation. More recently, Reshetnikov has also been an Invited Lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University, Central European University and Mathias Corvinus Collegium, all located in Budapest.

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