Networks are a substantial part of international affairs, passing within the condition of global anarchy described by Kenneth Waltz. While the networks of nation-states are well-researched, the role of subnational actors, particularly cities, requires further exploration and adaptation. Existing scholarship on global city networks has productively framed cities as agents of globalization, yet it often overlooks the critical dynamics of disintegration and exclusion. Macroregional decouplings and geopolitical ruptures can fracture these networks, creating opposing spheres of cooperation – a process acutely intensified by international shocks such as economic rivalry and military conflicts. The Russia-Ukraine war serves as a pivotal case. It triggered a stark divergence: a flourishing of city diplomacy for Ukrainian municipalities with the West alongside a cascade of severed ties for Russian cities with the same Western partners. While the former has been studied, systematic analysis of Russian cities' adaptation remains underdeveloped due to two reasons. First, cities (unlike federal subjects) lack the resources and visibility for meaningful international agency. Second, local governments in Russia experience extreme political and fiscal centralization that precludes substantive subnational autonomy. This study challenges these assumptions by investigating how Russian cities have rebuilt their international networking trajectories in response to the post-2022 geopolitical confrontation. It employs digital footprint analysis – gathering data from official city hall websites, mayoral communications, and social media platforms (VKontakte) – to map and analyze the evolving engagement networks of Russian cities from 2022 to 2025. Using Social Network Analysis (SNA) and qualitative content analysis, this research tests three core hypotheses: H1: Russian cities have actively increased engagement with partners out of the Transatlantic region to compensate for the loss of connections with the West. H2: This compensatory networking aligns with and is facilitated by Russia's state-led "alternative" regionalism projects, notably within the expanded BRICS+ framework, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). H3: During periods of systemic confrontation, city diplomacy is not an autonomous function but is heavily contingent upon and shaped by the nation-state's foreign policy priorities and bilateral relationships. The empirical findings will provide novel insights into the resilience and reorientation of subnational networks under severe geopolitical strain. The study's expected contribution is twofold. First, it challenges the universality of global city network models as tools of liberal internationalization. Second, it highlights the constrained agency of cities within centralized states, revealing how they become instruments for advancing national foreign policy in a fragmented world but on the subnational layout.

This article examines whether the electoral advantage commonly attributed to military veterans in democratic systems persists under authoritarian rule during an ongoing war. While existing literature on the “veteran’s advantage” is extensive, it is overwhelmingly focused on democratic contexts—primarily the United States—or on post-conflict societies transitioning away from military rule. No prior study has systematically analyzed the electoral performance of active combatants in an authoritarian regime amid continuing warfare. Addressing this gap, the article analyzes the case of participants in Russia’s war that officially named “Special Military Operation” who ran in local elections in 2025. Building on comparative research on military candidates in democracies, post-junta regimes, and post-rebel political movements, the study conceptualizes electoral outcomes in authoritarian regimes as the product of both elite coordination and voter preferences, even under conditions of manipulation. The article argues that authoritarian elections at the regional and municipal levels are not entirely predetermined and that candidate characteristics may still shape outcomes at the margin. In this context, the military represents a strategically important group for authoritarian co-optation: veterans possess independent social capital derived from combat experience, may pose risks of social instability if marginalized, and can be symbolically mobilized to legitimize the regime and fragment elite coalitions. Empirically, the study focuses on single-mandate city-council elections in the capitals of Russia’s constituent entities. Using original data compiled from investigative journalism and official election returns, the analysis compares 49 confirmed frontline SMO participants with 194 non-military candidates competing in the same districts. Ordinary least squares regression models are employed, with candidates’ vote share as the dependent variable and controls for party affiliation, age, region, and prior political experience. The results demonstrate that participation in the SMO is associated with a modest but consistent electoral premium of approximately four percentage points. This finding supports the hypothesis that military participation confers an advantage even in an authoritarian wartime context, rejecting the alternative expectation of a negative effect due to war fatigue or voter resentment. Overall, the article concludes that military participation in contemporary Russia yields a real but limited electoral benefit. Veteran status matters, but it neither transforms the structure of authoritarian competition nor compensates for the decisive role of party dominance. These findings contribute to broader debates on electoral authoritarianism, civil–military relations, and the political instrumentalization of war, highlighting how symbolic capital derived from combat is incorporated (and yet constrained) within authoritarian electoral institutions.

The war in Ukraine has abruptly amplified uncertainty not only in geopolitics but in the everyday lives of those under authoritarian rule. In Russia, the sudden onset of large-scale violence and subsequent intensification of repression forced activists and ordinary citizens to rapidly adapt their repertoires of protest. A remarkable but often underestimated trend was the unprecedented wave of antiwar petitions launched in Russia between February 24 and March 4, 2022—an episode that saw over 1.5 million signatures on nearly a hundred distinct texts in less than two weeks, before being swiftly curtailed by new censorship laws. This paper discusses how this episode shows the way protest repertoires can quickly change under hardening conditions and growing risks. Using a unique dataset of 127 petitions related to the war and in-depth interviews with people involved, I try to understand why so many Russians initiated or signed petitions although they saw them as dangerous and, as many readily acknowledged, useless for changing the government’s decisions. Contrary to the common idea that petitions are always safe and low-cost, we found that the antiwar petitions of 2022 meant real risks, both for people’s jobs and even for their freedom after new laws were introduced on March 4. Petitioners did not expect their protest to lead to policy change. Instead, what mattered most seemed to be to show solidarity with others, to make it visible that there are people against the war, and to make a public moral statement. For many, signing a petition was more about supporting others around them and not feeling alone than demanding change from the authorities. It also became a way to judge who is “with us” or “against us” in professional or social groups. I argue that, when the situation becomes very unpredictable and dangerous, the meaning of protest forms also changes. Petitions became a place where people could reaffirm values and create connections. This example from Russia suggests that, in authoritarian regimes, protest is not only about trying to win concrete goals, but also about building and maintaining relations between people, especially during a time of huge uncertainty and fear.

International Relations scholars (Heller, 2024; Rogstad, 2022) view Russia’s war in Ukraine as an effort to reassert its place within a hierarchical global order. They argue that Russia’s aggression can be understood as a response to geopolitical othering – a bid to reclaim agency and escape the identity of a subordinate or failed power. This paper demonstrates that a similar process happens at the level of everyday subjectivity among non-elite actors. Drawing on biographical interviews with a diverse sample Russian men living in Russia and abroad, this paper examines how the participants respond to the Western condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and to the resulting stigma of belonging to an ‘aggressor state’. I show that geopolitical stigmatisation generates intense anxieties about status, strength, and recognition among the participants with masculinity functioning as a key site where geopolitical humiliation, status loss, and imperial nostalgia are processed and negotiated. Building on scholarship that theorises stigma as a form of power, (Link & Phelan, 2014), I ask: What forms of power are negotiated through managing geopolitical stigma? The analysis identifies three stigma management strategies: ‘splitting and blaming,’ ‘disclaiming agency,’ and ‘turning to counter-discourses’ and demonstrates that the key forms of power under negotiation are gendered and imperial power. The study approaches masculinity as social practice intimately linked to the projects of nationalism (Nagel, 1998; Yuval-Davis, 1997) and imperialism (Connell, 2014; Gahman, 2020; Yusupova, 2023). If masculinity is tied to national prestige, status, and strength, then geopolitical stigma may be experienced as a gendered burden. Yet this intersection between stigma, masculinities, and global power hierarchies remains curiously underexplored. Tracing how Russian men negotiate the stigma of belonging to an ‘aggressor state’, I offer the concept of geopolitical stigma, as a crucial but overlooked form of power relations, and argue that masculinity functions as a key mechanism through which global coloniality and inter-imperiality are reproduced and normalised in everyday life.

Historically, Putin’s regime has relied on economic performance to consolidate public support. Previous research has shown that the approval of the authorities in Putin’s Russia is strongly associated with stability and economic dynamism. However, since the beginning of the so-called “conservative turn” in 2012 and especially since the launch of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin has also established a powerful apparatus of ideological indoctrination. In theory, ideology can replace or at least complement economic performance as a source of support for the regime. Our research, based on interviews with ordinary Russians and an original poll commissioned as part of the Alameda Institute project, reveals that economic performance still plays a powerful part in shaping pro-regime attitudes among middle-class Russians. Since 2022, the Kremlin has managed to avoid substantial economic decline and even achieved economic growth based on military spending and import substitution. Middle-class beneficiaries of this growth testify to the importance of material conditions for their newfound patriotism. While not constituting a fully-fledged support for the regime and its war in Ukraine, this new patriotic orientation is useful to the Kremlin as it ensures at least the temporary loyalty of an influential social group (the well-off urban middle class). At the same time, however, the narratives articulated by our middle-class interviewees in many ways diverge from regime propaganda. They are not fond of illiberal ideology and express vague yet recognizable liberal political sympathies. Our analysis of the interviews with ordinary Russians sheds light on the very mechanism of performance legitimacy. Material conditions do not mechanically translate into patriotism or pro-regime orientation. Instead, they become the basis for political thinking and imagination that connect the particular and the universal: personal economic gains and a positive vision of the country’s economic and social development. While generally happy with the regime’s internal policies, the interviewees do not simply rely of propaganda clichés to express their approval. They articulate their own vision of patriotism, based on logic as well as emotion, that is highly selective of official narratives and generally skeptical of the regime’s aggressive foreign policy orientation. In that sense, we contribute to the strand of research on the ideology in Putin’s Russia that emphasizes the co-creation of ideology by the regime and society at large.

Historically, Putin’s regime has relied on economic performance to consolidate public support. Previous research has shown that the approval of the authorities in Putin’s Russia is strongly associated with stability and economic dynamism. However, since the beginning of the so-called “conservative turn” in 2012 and especially since the launch of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin has also established a powerful apparatus of ideological indoctrination. In theory, ideology can replace or at least complement economic performance as a source of support for the regime. Our research, based on interviews with ordinary Russians and an original poll commissioned as part of the Alameda Institute project, reveals that economic performance still plays a powerful part in shaping pro-regime attitudes among middle-class Russians. Since 2022, the Kremlin has managed to avoid substantial economic decline and even achieved economic growth based on military spending and import substitution. Middle-class beneficiaries of this growth testify to the importance of material conditions for their newfound patriotism. While not constituting a fully-fledged support for the regime and its war in Ukraine, this new patriotic orientation is useful to the Kremlin as it ensures at least the temporary loyalty of an influential social group (the well-off urban middle class). At the same time, however, the narratives articulated by our middle-class interviewees in many ways diverge from regime propaganda. They are not fond of illiberal ideology and express vague yet recognizable liberal political sympathies. Our analysis of the interviews with ordinary Russians sheds light on the very mechanism of performance legitimacy. Material conditions do not mechanically translate into patriotism or pro-regime orientation. Instead, they become the basis for political thinking and imagination that connect the particular and the universal: personal economic gains and a positive vision of the country’s economic and social development. While generally happy with the regime’s internal policies, the interviewees do not simply rely of propaganda clichés to express their approval. They articulate their own vision of patriotism, based on logic as well as emotion, that is highly selective of official narratives and generally skeptical of the regime’s aggressive foreign policy orientation. In that sense, we contribute to the strand of research on the ideology in Putin’s Russia that emphasizes the co-creation of ideology by the regime and society at large.