NORMEMO spring 2023 guest lecture: Russia's cultural statecraft: What is left?

In this lecture, Tuomas Forsberg (University of Helsinki) will reflect on and update perspectives from the book Russia's Cultural Statecraft (2021) that he edited together with Sirke Mäkinen. The concept ‘cultural statecraft’ can be considered to offer some advantages compared to other notions, such as cultural diplomacy, public diplomacy, international cultural relations and, in particular, soft power, which also refer to cultural elements in world politics. The lecture will examine how cultural statecraft was developed in Russia after the end of the Cold War, and particularly during the Putin era after the mid-2000s, and discuss how the Ukraine crisis of 2014 and the large-scale war in 2022 affected Russia’s cultural statecraft and its perception abroad. What are the practical implications of this for cultural relations between Russia and the West?

Tuomas Forsberg is Director of Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki and has researched broadly into the political history and international relations of Northern Europe including Russia.
 
The lecture can be attended online or on-site at the University of Tromsø, Aase Hiorth Lervik room (N-119) in Breiviklia. Welcome!
 
The NORMEMO project is funded by the Research Council of Norway for the period 2021-2026. For more details, please visit our project web page, https://en.uit.no/project/normemo