Alexander Dugin: geopolitics and neo-fascism in post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

Abstract In this paper I aim to contribute to critical geopolitics through a discussion of the work of the radical right wing Russian geopolitician Alexander Dugin, focusing on his textbook The Fundamentals of Geopolitics: the geopolitical future of Russia. Dugin’s career and work are contextualized in terms of developments in Russian politics and the general shift towards Eurasianism in Russian foreign policy thinking in the last decade, and three main lines of inquiry are pursued. First, Dugin’s concept of geopolitics and his geopolitical strategy, conveyed both in text and maps (or cartogrammes), are related to debates about geopolitics, power and knowledge. I argue that Dugin’s geopolitics reproduce the worst excesses of the geopolitical and imperialist gaze, and I compare and contrast his proposals with aspects of current Russian foreign policy. Secondly, the relations between his work and questions of neo-fascism are explored. Here I argue that, despite the historically conflictual relationships between geopolitics and fascism, Dugin can in certain ways be considered a neo-fascist as well as a geopolitician. Thirdly, the relationship between rationalism and mysticism (or geopolitics and sacral geography) in Dugin’s writings, which I argue is connected in part with a reliance on environmental determinism and occultism, is highlighted at several points. Countless people…will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by the frustration of their passions and ambitions through its advent and will die protesting against it. H. G. Wells (1940, p. 170) . In complex post-modern times…geopolitical visions and visionaries seem to thrive. Gearoid O Tuathail (1998, p. 2) .