No 4 (2023)

It is substantiated that most of the modern Western left-wing political discourses constitute the ideology of new, “post-bourgeois” elites. This ideology is a mixture of concepts conditioned by the post-materialist values of the “cognitive” elites and the “creative class”. It is noted that a significant part of left-wing progressive ideas (including intersectional Marxism) leads to policies that counter the interests of a significant portion of the poor and socially vulnerable people. It is shown that the hypocrisy of the new elites, for whom leftist ideas have become a way of demonstrating their status (“luxury beliefs”), is not the only reason for this contradiction. The key problem is the unevenness of the movement towards post-capitalism. While classical Marxism assumed the primary importance of meeting the basic needs of everyone without exception, today only a relative minority achieved the state of “existential security”. This elite minority is imbued with communist values, but their anti-bourgeois universal humanism with its’ wide range of goals (from the idea of “open borders” to the protection of the rights and opportunities of “non-human animals”) is often not relevant in the context of the world in which many people still face material need and scarcity.

For many years the humanities have been in the shadow of natural and technical sciences. A significant share of funding - both budgetary and non-budgetary - is distributed in favor of natural and technical sciences, while social sciences and humanities account for only about 5% of funding. Grants provided by the Russian Science Foundation are largely aimed at supporting projects in the field of natural and technical sciences. Currently, there is a need to modernize approaches to research support by redistributing priorities in favor of cross-disciplinary studies (cognitive research, digital technologies, life and social sciences, digital humanities, etc.). The problems of social sciences and humanities are identified based on an integrated analysis of data in the field of natural and social sciences and humanities in the next areas: internal costs of research and development, sources of research and development funding, grant support for research projects by the Russian Science Foundation, and human resources capacity. Economic and statistical methods, as well as methods of grouping and comparative retrospective analysis are used. The data of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), The UNESCO Institute for Statistics, the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat), as well as reports of the Russian Science Foundation (RSF) served as the information base for the analysis. The key directions of development of social sciences and humanities are proposed on objective analytical conclusions about the need to intensify support of interdisciplinary scientific research within the framework of state programs of scientific and technological development. The results of the study can be used by public authorities of the Russian Federation in elaborating program documents aimed at the implementation of the state scientific and technological policy.

The European Union (EU) has developed as an actor that overcomes national sovereignty in global politics. Yet, as of 2017, the EU has used the “sovereignty” category at the supranational level, both in general and in combination with “sectoral” adjectives. The objective of research is to demonstrate that the use of “sectoral sovereignty” can be examined as the EU’s work with collective anxiety, which results from various challenges that can hardly be controlled. The anxiety is examined in the context of emotion culture with the focus on public images of sentiments whereas the incorporation of sovereignty in the EU’s discourse comes out as a “self-identification with an aggressor” - with something that has previously been viewed as a threat to integration. In the EU’s discourse “sovereignty” means a set of actions targeted at drawing a border between the internal and the external, at establishing higher autonomy. Three cases are examined with the help of discourse analysis: challenge of technological companies and monetary sovereignty; pandemic threat and health sovereignty; problems in global agricultural trade and food sovereignty. In each case elements of the EU’s collective anxiety are described; sovereignty as a system of actions to address anxiety is identified; the overall support for this work in the EU is revealed. The conclusions are drawn on when and where “sectoral” sovereignty helps the EU to limit its anxiety. Yet, the successful incorporation of sovereignty in the EU’s discourse does not mean a complete overcoming of anxiety; instead, dialectic relations between collective anxiety and sovereignty emerge.

The results of the analysis of the discursive field of contemporary scientific studies on the effects of public participation in digital communication spaces are presented. The process of increased digitalization of civic activism studied from the perspective of cyberoptimists and cyberpessimists. The key components of the contexts formed by researchers, defining the features of representation and correlation of such positions in the academic environment are highlighted. The negative effects of digital activism are seen in the increase of social disunity and citizen passivity, the crisis of democratic institutions and political participation. The positive effects are in many ways the opposite of negative and more extensive. Digital activism creates a cyberspace of action that facilitates the development of civic practices and values, as well as extends previous forms of civic interaction. The networking of actions in social media reduces the transaction costs of organizing civic action. Social media users who actively participate in online public actions have stronger intentions to offline participation, thus ensuring the transfer of civic engagement from the virtual to the real environment. Digital activism offers great opportunities for innovative actions based on social networks, which allow a greater impact on social change with less effort. The polarization of the scientific community, the fragmentation of the discursive field on the influence of digital communications on civic activism, and the predominance of subjective and ideologized approaches in the research outlined in the paper, constitute new challenges for social sciences at the current stage of development.

Issues related to the gender gap in the federal government authorities of Russia are discussed. It is emphasized that Russian women are alienated from “big politics” despite the fact that women have more substantial (compared to men) human capital. This contradiction should be resolved through extension of women’s representation in government bodies of various levels and especially at the federal level, taking into account the highly centralized nature of political power in Russia. The gender pyramid of power (the higher is the power level the lower is women’s representation) was built in the Soviet time and is reproduced in modern Russia without essential modifications. Nevertheless currently the gender structure of economy management is changing women take part in entrepreneurship and management of companies, including the top-management level, more actively. It is concluded that the gender-balanced economy is gradually established in Russia, and it will require more active and responsible participation of Russian women in the political sphere. Non-commercial organizations and public movements, that are efficient enough nowadays in Russia, can be a means of women’s political mobilization. The article is based on the data of the Federal State Statistics Service of Russia (Rosstat) and the World Economic Forum.