Responses to Russia and the World. 2016 IMEMO Forecast
Responses to Russia and the World. 2016 IMEMO Forecast

Summary/Abstract: The new IMEMO report ‘Russia and the World: 2016’ is, as its name suggests, an undertaking of a global scope. The one-hundred-and-forty-seven pages of its original Russian version cover all and everything that is relevant to the topic, and Russia, as the authors seem to suggest, has an acquired stake in and a legitimate right to interfere into all of that all and everything as a “great power” (p. 122 [RU]) and a global actor “less mighty, but not less influential” (p. 132 [RU]) than the US. As such, IMEMO’s opus should be certainly treated as more than a simple forecast. More precisely, if it were to be taken as a simple product of a forecasting think-tank, it could be easily accused of being too quirky and politically engaged: many of its predictions related to foreign policy are safely ambiguous, while some of its claims about the present state of affairs may be interpreted as unfoundedly judgmental. Yet, if one were to look at it as a mirror of Russia’s political imagination and a manifestation of the discursive tensions that preoccupy its identity politics, the Forecast would certainly make a very interesting read. More so, New Perspectives seems to have encouraged reading it in such a way by publishing an abridged translation of the Forecast with most of the quantitative data and other ‘less significant’ details taken away. Therefore, it is this identitarian dimension of the Forecast that I would like to discuss in my short response. I believe that the political consequences of looking at it in this way are significant.

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