Regimes of Engagement and Protest in Russia: A Reply to Arnold, Sidorkina, and Shevchenko

Mischa Gabowitsch (2020)

Nationalities Papers, 48(2), pp. 414-418

Introduction. “The study of protest in Russia and other post-socialist states is a field where there is still too little constructive debate and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries. Selective clusters of mutual attention exist; however, there are too many cases where sociologists and political scientists ignore or dismiss much of each other’s work, cultural studies reinvent wheels long used by geographers, and all of the above remain oblivious to research in history or historical anthropology. Thus, to someone who has tried to take contributions from different quarters seriously, this symposium on my book Protest in Putin’s Russia is especially welcome for bringing together perspectives from three different disciplines—sociology, social linguistics, and political science. I thank the Association for the Study of Nationalities, the editors of Nationalities Papers, and the three contributors for this honor and privilege. I am grateful for their attentive reading and humbled by their praise for my book. All three reviews focus on the book’s central methodological framework—the conceptual apparatus of regimes of engagement and grammars of commonality. Besides offering stimulating comments, the three examinations also reveal a number of misunderstandings regarding that framework. I shall therefore devote most of my response to restating it and addressing some of these misunderstandings as well as the substantive suggestions, before returning once more to the accursed and somewhat scholastic question of the middle class.” (p. 414)

Link to the review