Is the War on Message? Political Communication in Russia Before and After February with Dr. Maria Sidorkina (University of Texas at Austin)

How can we understand the success with which Putin's regime has managed the war against Ukraine at home? In this talk, Dr. Sidorkina will set aside the strong-arm tactics the regime used to dismantle the opposition's political and media institutions, to consider the structure of the public sphere before February 2022. Drawing on fieldwork data with regional civic activist collected over the last decade, she will show that oppositional political actors had developed channels to effectively address regional publics and to mobilize them for local governance. However, within the national conversation, opposition leaders repeatedly failed to design their "message" to address ordinary Russians—leading to the opposition’s continued social marginalization.

Thursday, October 6, 2022 4:00 pm - 5:00 PM EDT Suite 412, Fourth Floor The Elliot School of International Affairs 1957 E St. NW  REGISTER

Maria Sidorkina is an Assistant Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she conducts research and teaches courses on protest and public life in Russia and post-Soviet Eurasia, Soviet society under socialism, digital ethnography, and language and interaction. After receiving her PhD in Anthropology from Yale she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Davis Center, as well as the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst.

Save the Date:

Join us for the next installment in this series The Kremlin's Echo Chambers: Why Russians Trust Propaganda and Reject Independent Media Dr. Anton Shirikov Columbia University Wednesday, October 12, 2022 4:00pm-5:00pm The Elliott School of International Affairs 1957 E St NW

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PONARS Eurasia is an international network of scholars advancing new approaches to research on security, politics, economics, and society in Russia and Eurasia. The program is based at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. PONARS Eurasia is supported in part by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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