CAS SEE Seminars with Guests: Ilya Kalinin

There is a well-developed research tradition that has developed within the frames of social sciences (primarily social history, political science and economics), which describes the strong correlations that arise between the orientation of the national economy towards the extraction of natural resources (primarily oil) and its socio-political effects: authoritarian rule, low investment in human capital, militarization of foreign policy, technological backwardness, etc.

Ilya Kalinin will overcome this rigid determinism and try to show that the correlations between the orientation towards hydrocarbons (and oil in particular) and the socio-cultural effects of this orientation/dependence can be more diverse.

This approach is an attempt to reveal how different ideological and sociocultural frameworks can construct different meanings attributed to oil. This can be compared to the process, basic to the oil industry itself, of cracking or high-temperature refining, in which oil is split into fractions needed to produce motor fuels, lubricating oils, and raw materials for the chemical industry. Similarly, in the process of cultural refining of oil, various social, ideological, political-economic, and political “f(r)actions” are extracted from it, differing from each other by different rhetorical topics, symbolic load, temporal horizon, and ideological perspectives.

Based on this analytical optics, the history of Soviet and post-Soviet oil demonstrates the presence of several ideological and political “f(r))actions” or symbolic political economies that have succeeded each other and coexisted with each other over 20-21 centuries. The presentation will be devoted to a general description of this approach and the mapping of these f(r)actions.