Dr Igor Torbakov
IASH-SSPS Research Fellow, April - July 2024
Home institution: Uppsala University
Igor Torbakov is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. A trained historian, he specializes in East European, Russian and Eurasian intellectual and cultural history. He held fellowships at the Kennan Institute, Columbia University, Harvard University, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, the German Council on Foreign Relations, Södertörn University, the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author, most recently, of After Empire (2018).
Project title: The Anti-imperialist Empire? Russia-Eurasia and Post/Decoloniality
This project intends to explore Russian historical experience within the context of the debates on postcoloniality, demonstrate its contradictory nature stemming from the specific features of the Russian/Soviet empire, and indicate some problematic instances of convergence between Russian Kremlin-friendly intellectuals and some key representatives of contemporary decolonial thinking. At the heart of the project is the investigation of Russian political imagination – specifically, the 200-year-old tradition of imagining Russia (a colonial power itself) as a “colony” of the West. This imaginary, driven by a desire for recognition, counterposes local episteme to the hegemonic “European”/“Western” discourse. Four Russian schools of thought will be considered: Slavophiles of the 1840s-50s, Eurasianists of the 1920s-30s, early Soviet Marxists, and the post-Soviet champions of the “discourse of civilization.”