Neutrollization: Industrialized trolling as a pro-Kremlin strategy of desecuritization

Introduction

On 27 February 2015, Boris Nemtsov was assassinated on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge near the Kremlin. The immediate reactions of the blogosphere and the official TV channels in Russia to the assassination were almost identical, with both proliferating bewildering (but seemingly coordinated) theories as to what stood behind the murder. Dmitry Kiselev’s programme on the Rossiya 24 channel, notorious for its unabashed embracement of the Kremlin’s style and agenda, illustrates the trolling frame that straddled both types of media. The programme on 1 March 2015 mashed up personal motives, the role of the West, the involvement of Ukraine, the sacrifice of Nemtsov by the opposition for the purposes of furthering its goals with regard to an upcoming opposition march and a connection to radical Islamists that was allegedly the result of Nemtsov’s position on the Charlie Hebdo affair (Rossiya 24, 2015a). The blogosphere simultaneously produced multiple identical or similar messages with a thematic template that matched that of Rossiya 24. Kiselev’s programme one week later covered the official arrest of the suspects from Chechnya and Ingushetia; however, it did so in parallel with a prior statement by a spokesperson for the investigative committee that Nemtsov could have been a strategic sacrifice for the anti-regime cause (Rossiya 24, 2015b). And it furthered this troll-like behaviour by linking the arrests to a Chechen battalion sponsored by a Ukrainian oligarch that was thought to support the Kyiv authorities in Eastern Ukraine.

Why persist with such a multiplication of allegations if the official arrests excluded a direct commission by the Kremlin? Why should the emulation of a trolling frame get immediately under way across the pro-Kremlin media and the seemingly citizenry-originated blogosphere? How might we make sense of the intensity and effects of political trolling in, and beyond, today’s Russia?

We submit that the widespread publicity surrounding Russia’s hacking activities in international politics, featured as much in late-night comedy shows as in security briefings, conceals the origins and daily practices of the trolling culture in Russia and its subsequent spillover into the international realm. In the contextual analysis that follows, we argue that empirical manifestations of a trolling frame, such as those mentioned above, represent a wider practice of what we call neutrollization – a type of localized desecuritization-by-trolling that disrupts and thus prevents perlocution – that is, the social consequences of the security speech act. Kremlin trolls generate meaninglessness, neutralizing civil society attempts to cast the regime as a societal security threat. Rather than advocating a distinct political agenda, however, neutrollization despoils and precludes the very possibility of meaning. Political mobilization thus becomes absurd. The modus operandi of neutrollization is not, however, a counter-securitization in any recognizable discursive form. Neutrollization operates through the multiplication of non-securitizing (although highly sensationalized, contradictory and seemingly citizenry-originated) speech acts. As such, it is a practice that challenges the standard conceptualization of desecuritization as normatively superior but theoretically and practically inferior to securitization and typically performed by non-state actors. The broader historical precondition for this type of preventative desecuritization to occur and succeed has been the tradition of ‘politics without telos’ and the consequent non-relation between the state and society in Russia. Such a condition, as we discuss below, differs from the notion of depoliticization as the erasure of politics and also demonstrates the need for a more rigorous contextual analysis.

It was, we claim, a sustained attempt by civil society to undermine this non-relation and to construct the Kremlin as a societal security threat that triggered the onset of neutrollization, a radical intervention to preserve ‘politics without telos’. Bolotnaya Square in Moscow became emblematic of a nationwide wave of protests between 2011 and 2013 against the results of legislative and presidential elections. The so-called non-systemic opposition ¹ joined forces, formed a coordination committee, mobilized tens of thousands of people to participate in anti-regime protests and formulated a series of programmatic anti-regime documents (e.g. the ‘Manifesto of Free Russia’ [Nemtsov, 2012]). The government was forced to make a number of concessions, such as to reinstall elected governorship and liberalize party legislations. But, in the summer of 2013, the Internet Research Agency [Agentstvo internet-issledovanij], also known as a ‘troll factory’, was founded. We claim that this organization forms part of a larger agenda of neutralizing the potential for further political mobilization. While industrial-scale, institutionalized political trolling has affinities with the wider trolling culture, neutrollization is an example of hackers’ activities being co-opted by a government and, as such, constitutes a new type of trolling practice. Specifically, against the basic trolling premise of ‘doing it for the lulz’ – that is, for the digital schadenfreude produced by pranks, insults and misrepresentation – pro-Kremlin trolls create meaninglessness for the purpose of shielding the regime. At the same time, trolling agents themselves remain estranged from this purpose, as their fabrications are not part of trolling self-expression but are performed on commission. Such commission is also antithetical to the activist sensibility epitomized by hacktivist collectives and their ethic of trolling ‘for justice’. Although their actions are invariably dressed in offensive humour, Anonymous, for instance, have mobilized against censorship and the crooked state of governments and corporations alike, acquiring, in at least some depictions, the reputation of being purposeful agents broadening and opening public debate against established power structures and hypocrisies (see, for example, Anon, 2013; Coleman, 2015). In contrast, the practice of pro-Kremlin trolling radically deactivates the very telos of public debate, creating another category of political trolling, wherein neither justice nor ‘lulz’ figures as a primary rationale. In terms of security theory, organized, regime-supporting trolling implodes the security equation as established in a foundational early model of securitization (Buzan et al., 1998). Examined in contextual detail, neutrollization countervails dominant models of desecuritization, compelling reconceptualization in a manner that challenges not only existing concepts but also prevailing modes of theorizing.

In what follows we, first, define the practice of trolling and how it has been appropriated by Russia’s pro-regime blogosphere. We then reconceptualize desecuritization as a contextual phenomenon of neutrollization to designate and more precisely articulate the state-co-opted practice of desecuritization-by-trolling. We abductively move back and forth between embedding the empirical reality of pro-Kremlin trolling in the local tradition of desecuritization and contextualizing this process within existing formulations of desecuritization. In so doing, we situate our reconceptualization within various strands of contextualism in security theory and in relation to tensions present in apriorist (as opposed to theoretically abductive) formulations of desecuritization. Rather like Bourbeau and Vuori (2015) and Vuori (2018), we suggest that desecuritization can take preventive forms as an independent security practice; however, we concretize this insight by bringing to bear the local condition of ‘politics without telos’. Conceptually, we utilize Wæver’s (1989, 1995, 2002) early understandings of desecuritization, conceived as staying below securitization’s threshold. We substantiate this early understanding of desecuritization through the sociological model of securitization and, in particular, Balzacq’s concentration on perlocution (that which is thwarted by the practice of trolling). We subsequently demonstrate the overall logic and concrete modus operandi of neutrollization through an analysis of interviews with former ‘trolls’ – both those available in the public domain and those conducted on our own, and through an examination of trolling trails generated after the assassination of Boris Nemtsov. ² Our method is informed by digital ethnography, ³ which in this case involves immersion in the Russian blogosphere, engagement with embedded journalists and interaction with participants.

A caveat is due before we proceed. It is undoubtedly difficult to definitively distinguish voluntary pro-regime commenting from institutionalized trolling activity. The secretive nature of the industry, as well as the creative and continually renewed manual composition of most of the posts, prevents drawing definitive conclusions about the overall scope of trolling activity and, at times, makes the unambiguous identification of trolls problematic. Nevertheless, an estimation of the prevalence of troll accounts and reliable identification of some of them is not out of the question. The former has already been achieved to some degree through the use of large-N methods and network analysis (Alexander, 2015a, 2015b), and the latter can often be accomplished by examining suspected accounts for patterns discordant with regular user behaviour, such as identical phrases posted from different accounts, the absence of connections, photos and basic information correlated with the time and date of an account’s creation, etc. (Soshnikov, 2015). Several detailed journalistic investigations, cited below, demonstrate that institutionalized political trolling has become an identifiable phenomenon, and we take this as our starting point, without making definite claims about the exact scope of this activity or its exclusive and fully demonstrated connection to the presidential administration.

Pro-Kremlin trolls: When tricksters lose their lulz

The word ‘troll’ originally denoted a provocative post intended to sow discord by generating a trail of contentious posting. Online ‘trolling’ is the practice of behaving in a deceptive, destructive or disruptive manner in a social setting on the internet, with no apparent instrumental purpose. Phillips (2015: 1) specifies two basic rules of trolling: Nothing should be taken seriously; and, if it exists, there is porn of it. In fact, the only reason for a troll, qua troll, to do anything is amusement derived from another person’s anger. It is all about ‘lulz’, arguably the most important concept within the troll community. ‘Lulz’, a corruption, or perfection, of ‘laugh out loud’, is a sort of primeval, chaotic joy derived at the expense of others. It celebrates the anguish of the laughed-at victim and, crucially, does not distinguish between friends and foes (Phillips, 2015: 27–28). Lulz is more important than whence or from whom it is derived. Yet it has a deep significance in that it infiltrates and affects the consensus around politics, ethics and aesthetic sensibilities (Coleman, 2015: 32). It is common to compare trolls to mythological tricksters. Both are liminal figures who defy norms and revel in causing chaos; both almost never editorialize or tell the audience what to make of their message. ‘Genuine’ trolls do not posit clear political meaning. Any display of sentimentality, political conviction or ideological rigidity is a call to trolling arms. Crucially for our argument, both tricksters and trolls are agents of cultural digestion rather than being alienated rebels. Although trolling is a counter-hegemonic cultural practice, trolls in fact emerge from mainstream culture: They are embedded within dominant institutions and tropes, and they exploit and repurpose existing materials (Phillips, 2015: 10). Trolls’ acts of aggression are neither random nor revolutionary – they are consistent with a certain symbolic framework.

In the pro-Kremlin Russian blogosphere, the original chaos-generating element of online trolling is preserved in an institutionalized form. Instead of trying to consistently argue in favour of a political position in order to transform users’ political preferences and mould their allegiance to the current regime, enlisted trolls generate a superfluity of conflicting opinions, producing a flooding effect. Their practice thus operates as a coordinated spread of prefabricated pro-regime views on politically sensitive issues, produced by creating posts and comments using fictitious profiles in social networks. This is not, however, to alter the political preferences of the audience (see Anton Nosik, cited in Soshnikov, 2015), at least not in the sense of changing one ideologically loaded and coherent political position (e.g. liberal) to another coherent political position (e.g. statist). The outcome rather is that the audience becomes disoriented and begins to perceive politics in general as a realm of irreconcilable contradictions and moral filth. Neutrollization erodes willingness to contribute to online political debates and annihilates the influence of civil society’s speech acts when those still appear. It fuels the population’s resentment of political engagement and its disillusionment with the possibility of meaningful communication in the public sphere. In such a mode of techno-authoritarianism, the ability of an ordinary internet user to separate truth from fiction is fundamentally sabotaged: ‘Nothing is true and everything is possible,’ as Pomerantsev (2015) puts it.

Furthermore, if, traditionally, trolling is a recreational activity carried out by relatively privileged private individuals that self-organize in an ad hoc manner, pro-Kremlin trolling campaigns are two-tiered: They are orchestrated by collectives that develop their agenda in line with the interests of the regime, and they get implemented, at least partially, by precarious workers who craft their posts in accordance with the guidelines provided (Polyanskaya et al., 2009; Rezunkov, 2016; Volcheck and Sindelar, 2015). Evidently, Russian political trolling is done neither for the lulz nor for justice. While this does not eradicate the agency of the posting trolls, the agency becomes irrelevant and the anonymity of the trolling agents acquires a new dimension. It is not about being a proud anon, either a ruthless bully or a defiant activist. It is instead about being estranged from the message. Acting according to the template also effaces the quality of transgression. The command to be ludic kills the lulz.

The language game of desecuritization

Neutrollization stifles the conditions of possibility for bottom-up attempts to construct the Kremlin as a societal security threat and thus establish an accountable relation between the state and society. Political trolling here is a contextual mechanism of desecuritization, and its tools take shape in accordance with the local political experience. This local political experience and the mechanism of neutrollization, however, can only be captured contextually. In order to make contextualization possible, we first situate our analysis with regard to the role of context in security theory and then problematize impediments to contextualism pertinent to the problem at hand. These are, specifically, a typology of politics informed by the Western democratic experience and the prescriptive take on desecuritization. We build from there to offer an original conceptualization of neutrollization.

The debate on contextualism in contemporary security theory has been robust, with three distinct positions occupied by, respectively: radical contextualists, who deduce the rules of security from contextual security practices (Bubandt, 2005; Ciutӑ, 2009); the sociological approach to securitization, which builds on the intersubjectivity of the security act but upholds the significance of a priori rules that structure the intersubjective process (Balzacq, 2005, 2010, 2014b; Stritzel, 2007); and the ‘Copenhagen’ model of self-referential security wherein the successful speech act of security under prescribed rules transforms the context. The last of these – the early securitization model – supplies the vocabulary that sets the parameters of the debate. The sociological focus on perlocution – that is, the social consequences of the security speech act – makes it conceptually possible to identify the local mechanism of neutrollization, or more broadly ‘desecuritization-by-trolling’, which prevents perlocutionary effects. By preventing perlocution, trolling disrupts the constitution of the intersubjective space in which civil society’s move to construct the regime as a threat could be meaningfully recognized, or even attempted. In order, however, to contextualize neutrollization within the particularity of pro-Kremlin trolling, we take the in situ logic of analysis from radical contextualists and reconstruct Russian security practices from within local political history (see Bubbandt, 2005; Guzzini, 2011). This approach, notable as a contextual analysis of desecuritization wherein the meaning of the concept crystallizes from within an evolving social practice, tends to remain below the analytical radar of security theorists. While a major criticism levelled against desecuritization has been that it lacks conceptual rigour, which renders the concept unwieldy for empirical application (Snetkov, 2015, 2017), we suggest, by contrast, that desecuritization should be understood primarily as a political process and problem. As desecuritization acquires its logic in context, greater conceptual rigour alone will not turn it into a better analytical tool.

Conceptual fiat may, in particular, render concrete practices invisible. In our case, the context of neutrollization becomes difficult to grasp if approached through the concepts of politics applied in securitization studies thus far. Gad and Petersen (2011) delineate three such concepts: politics as the production of meaning, politics as a modern institutional organization, and politics as ethical science. None of these, it must be said, reflect the politics that underpins state–society relations in Russia – a contrast aptly captured by Prozorov’s (2008) notion of the deactivation of the teleological dimension of politics and Wilson’s (2005) ‘virtual politics’. There has been an exodus of Russian society from value-based political antagonism, consolidated according to Prozorov during the 1970s and the early 1980s, while the regime has moved to a strategy of deliberately fostering depoliticization from the beginning of the 1990s onwards (Prozorov, 2008: 214). However, while the undermining of value-based antagonism can be understood as depoliticizing on one level, in another respect it is itself a form of politics – a form that is, indeed, central to a particular ethico-political project. In the Yeltsinite era, such politics without telos was enacted through experimentation with countless political projects without ever approaching their logical ends. In Putin’s Russia, the condition of depoliticization is forcefully preserved through the prioritized telos of ‘stability’, imposed on a purportedly directionless world wherein stability, from anything but a regime-centred perspective, loses its meaning. One expression of ‘politics without telos’ is Wilson’s ‘virtual politics’, a ‘political technology’ that is a localized version of political manipulation and a continuation of a tradition of doublespeak inherited from the Bolshevik era (Wilson, 2005: xv). The system of virtual politics requires neither tyranny nor exploitation. It relies on invention, both by the authority and by the opposition, with virtuality being as important as control in containing democracy and preventing a real pattern of representation and accountability (Wilson, 2005: xvi, 39).

Accordingly, what looks like depoliticization if approached through the mainstream of Western political theory is a configuration of politics if approached contextually. The prescription of what desecuritization should be similarly functions as an impediment to contextual conceptualization. There are three issues in particular that hinder a contextual analysis of desecuritization: ⁴ its postulated normative superiority, its conceptual inferiority vis-à-vis securitization and the assumption that desecuritization necessarily follows securitization, both temporarily and logically. We discuss each of these points in turn in order to fully articulate our own conceptual claim.

First, as initially articulated by Wæver (1995: 57, 1999: 335, 2002: 49), desecuritization has been portrayed as an option that is normatively preferable to its alter ego, a universally and morally right goal to which one should aspire. Early examples of embracing desecuritization as normatively preferable include Huysmans’ (1998) definition of desecuritization as a normative project and Aradau’s (2004) pitch to understand it in terms of emancipation. Huysmans (1998: 587) suggests that if, in a government’s rationality, securitization is about reintroducing value content and antagonism into social relations, then desecuritization’s task is to break down such a passage. In a similar normative vein, Aradau (2004: 398–400) argues that whereas securitization institutes the politics of enmity and exceptionalism, and is enacted through the non-democratic constitution of authority, societal actors should desecuritize socially relevant issues through disidentification with the regime and by creating relations that are not rooted in the exclusionary and non-democratic logic of security. Aradau, however, has been criticized for the universalizing premises of such argument and the consequent erasure of political particularity from security as concretely realized (Behnke, 2006; Roe, 2009). Subsequent works have further questioned the necessarily normatively favourable effects of desecuritization. In an analysis of US environmental policies, Floyd (2010) demonstrates how desecuritization potentially produces diverse outcomes, including normatively ambiguous depoliticization, and argues that its moral standing should be judged according to concrete social effects. MacKenzie’s (2009) case of desecuritization by exclusion shows how labelling female ex-combatants in Sierra Leone as ‘camp followers’, ‘abductees’ or ‘sex slaves’ precludes securitization of their roles and thus their benefiting from post-conflict social policies.

Second, desecuritization has often been regarded as a conceptual twin (Aradau, 2004: 389; Hansen, 2012: 526) or opposite (Taureck, 2006: 55) of securitization, a view that tends to be conflated with the third point, namely, the dominant understanding of desecuritization as necessarily following securitization. It is envisaged as a fully fledged reversal mechanism for bringing a certain issue from the sphere of emergency politics to the sphere of normal politics. Such a perspective conditioned and was conditioned by the joint use of the terms, as in ‘securitization/desecuritization’ or ‘(de)securitization’. Hansen’s (2012) typology of desecuritization (change through stabilization, replacement, rearticulation and silencing) illustrates these practices. Built around a constrained range of what the political and the political sphere mean, the typology remains faithful to the principle that desecuritization occurs as a result of (reverse) speech acts: Desecuritization is the opposite of what we decide securitization to be. If, for example, securitization is based on Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political as the sovereign’s decision on exception and thus a move away from the Arendtian public sphere, then desecuritization, as securitization’s conceptual twin, should do the opposite – that is, unmake the decision and restore the genuine public sphere (Hansen, 2012: 529–533). Bourbeau and Vuori (2015) challenged this political and conceptual sequentialism by identifying ‘pre-emptive desecuritization through rebuttal’ in Chinese foreign policy since the 1970s. They show how Chinese authorities have crafted a foreign policy discourse based on the idea of a peaceful power to block the escalation of contention – that is, crossing other states’ securitization thresholds. Vuori (2018) substantiates this analysis by delineating specific practices of preventative desecuritization in different moments of China’s post-Cold War relations with other major powers. Recently, Austin and Beaulieu-Brossard (2017) have brought the normative and sequential dilemmas of desecuritization to a sharp relief by demonstrating how it is often performed simultaneously with securitization, thus facilitating swaying the audience towards accepting securitizing moves.

In the context of the latter works, neutrollization can be seen as a normatively corrupted and preventative desecuritization. We conceptualize its mechanism by bringing together the nuanced relationship between securitization and desecuritization in Ole Wæver’s early work and the sociological model of securitization developed by Thierry Balzacq. Such conceptualization reveals neutrollization to be a form of political intervention that contextually prevents perlocution in order to maintain the non-relation between state and society in Russia. In Wæver’s (1989, 1995) early work, desecuritization is not envisaged as a speech act designed to move a securitized issue away from the sphere of exceptional politics for two reasons. First, in the cases of European security between 1960 and 1990 and Europe in 1989, the question of the power to desecuritize eludes easy designations. During the Cold War, the authority to introduce certain issues into the political agenda was severely restricted. Desecuritization therefore amounted to keeping things below securitization’s threshold. In 1989, the conversation was predominantly held among elites, which reduced the scope of politics. Second, in the same period, a desecuritizing speech act would necessarily employ security language, while security terms had to be avoided. In this context, Wæver discusses two strategies of desecuritization that we tentatively call: (1) desecuritization through effacement/prevention of securitizing speech acts and (2) desecuritization through speech act failure. The first works to prevent the mechanism of securitization; however, it is not a purely counteractive option. It does not take a securitized issue, delegitimize the emergency measures mobilized against a security threat, and then move the issue back into normal politics. Rather, it effaces decisive acts in order to deliberately mask certain resistance strategies by relegating them to ordinary spheres of economics, culture and non-exceptional politics, where they cannot be mobilized as a cause for securitization. ⁵ The second strategy creates conditions that make it difficult or impossible to transit from the illocutionary uptake of a securitizing speech act to its intended perlocutionary sequel. ⁶ Wæver conceptualizes securitization as an illocutionary speech act (Wæver, 1995: 79–80n23; see also Stritzel, 2011: 349; Vuori, 2008) – that is, a ‘pure speech act dimension’ that does not depend on the effect on the receiver and, hence, is a matter of force, not truth or actual outcome (Wæver, 1989: 42–44). The possibility of speech act failure that desecuritization mobilizes resides, however, at the border between the illocutionary speech act of securitization and its perlocutionary effect, which is a perlocutionary act in itself. We turn to the sociological model of securitization to explain it.

Perlocution – that is, successfully swaying the intended audience of the speech act – is, as Balzacq argues, specific to context. It is a historical process (Balzacq, 2010: 14) and a strategic, pragmatic move that occurs within particular circumstances informed by antecedent conditions and power relations, requiring the use of contextually appropriate tools that take into consideration the psycho-social disposition of the audience (Balzacq, 2005, 2010). In effect, security practices must respond to commonly accepted values if they are to be socially binding (Balzacq, 2014b: 3). The tradition of ‘politics without telos’ caters to such a contextual proviso for neutrollization to occur and succeed. Perlocution, or the act of preventing perlocution, is best understood through the intersubjectivity of the sociological model of securitization, which has three core assumptions: the centrality of the audience; the codependency of agency and context; and the dispositive and structuring force of practices (Balzacq, 2010: 8–18). Trolling implodes the security equation so conceived. It disrupts the very basis of intersubjective agreement and, in the case of neutrollization, the conditions of possibility for such a relation between civil society as a would-be securitizing actor and the broader Russian society as the audience. It does so, most strikingly, by distorting the requirements of intelligibility for the security speech act. The words and arguments that could be used to securitize lose their performative power. They are ironized and become useless. They can therefore no longer deliver perlocutionary effect – that is, the persuasion of the audience and legitimization of emergency measures. More fundamentally, neutrollization disrupts the very act of the constitution of the audience that could emerge in the intersubjective process of threat construction. It does so by breaking or disrupting the context in which acts of securitization could materialize and, therefore, thwarts the recognition of the legitimacy of a subject attempting securitization against the state. Few ties can be forged in the context of such chaos when cynicism is the primary rule of engagement. Below, we demonstrate how this unfolds in practice.

Political trolling: How it works

Conclusion

This article considered the significance of trolling for contemporary security through a contextual analysis of industrialized pro-Kremlin trolling. It identified a particular form of desecuritization, neutrollization, that reflects a type of techno-authoritarian practice by the government against its society. Neutrollization has little to do with coercion or with overtly coercive silencing. Nor is it fundamentally propagandistic in the classic sense of producing messages intended to convince, although doubtless many of its messages will be taken seriously. This is not (or not only), therefore, a matter of the production of ‘false consciousness’ as such. Its victims are not dupes or fools. On the contrary, neutrollization both presupposes and functions through the critical faculties of citizens, making them doubt everything and, hence, withdraw from public discourse with a dejected shrug. Neutrollization is not, therefore, the classic ‘manufacturing of consent’ à la Herman and Chomsky (2002) but, rather, the manufacturing of cynicism.

Agents of the regime thus mobilize their technological, economic but also context-dependent social capital in order to stage a political intervention and maintain a structural pattern of non-relation between state and society in a non-securitizing manner. This occurs via the two strategies of desecuritization identified above: effacement or prevention of securitizing speech acts and speech act failure. These thwart the constitution of a societal audience by civil society actors and thus preclude the condition of possibility for the intersubjective agreement between civil society and society at large. Crucially, instead of an instance of popular resistance to the oppressive regime, neutrollization works as a defensive means for the regime itself. Its tools are made contextually appropriate: It lives off ironizing the rationale of the public sphere in order to keep the regime free from a relation of accountability, preemptively pacifying potential political mobilization. The logic of continuing trolling operations concerning Nemtsov’s assassination when the official arrests excluded the involvement of the Kremlin is no longer puzzling: Establishing the real culprit hardly matters in the game of securing the non-relation. What matters is keeping up corruption by chaos. The non-relation between the Russian regime and society can hence be reproduced and intensified, shielding the regime from the kind of accountability that the establishment of such a relation might produce.

On the theoretical side, neutrollization, through its abductive derivation, nuances apriorist models of desecuritization based on one-scenario normativity and linear sequences of threat construction. Its condition of ‘politics without telos’ problematizes the security equation as we know it from securitization studies and prompts more context-sensitive conversation on security practice. Substantively, neutrollization textures the logic of the trolling turn in Russian foreign policy, beyond generic refrains about revisionist power. It is well observed that Russia resorts to parody in communicating its actions to the outside world, making Western liberal norms its principal object of travesty. One of the most striking precursors of this trend was Sergey Lavrov’s justification of the intervention in Georgia in 2008 as exercising a responsibility to protect Russian citizens, inferred from the constitution of the Russian Federation – a direct mocking of the original liberal premise of the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect, which refers to the responsibility to protect any individual regardless of their citizenship or ethnicity (Kurowska, 2014). Official justifications of the incorporation of the Crimea in 2014 cited in the same breath the responsibility to protect Russian citizens and soldiers abroad, claims of a humanitarian crisis, warnings of a minority group in danger, and the inviolability of the principle of self-determination (Reshetnikov, 2017). In her analysis of Russia’s twisting the Western normative grammar, Burai (2016: 67) argues that ‘the parodic effect is to disclose the original normative discourse as just one possible “reality-making script”’. In other words, ‘nothing is true and everything is possible’. Perhaps the most vivid, though mundane, example of trolling-like spillover into Russian diplomacy is the communication, in an official and social media capacity, by the current spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who exercises the trolling vocabulary in ministerial briefings. In reaction to the news about the deaths of Russian servicemen as a result of the American bombings of Deir Ez-Zor in Syria in February 2018, Maria Zakharova (2018) denied that any Russians had been killed, whether the alleged figure was 400 or 10, and continued: ‘Interestingly, the anti-government Syrian militants were among the first ones, perhaps, even before the [Western] media, to pass along this disinformation on their media channels. For reasons unknown, they took a photo of the surface of Mars and superimposed an image – dated July 2014 – of destroyed, possibly Ukrainian, military equipment on it’.

While domestically neutrollization is a techno-authoritarian practice that pacifies the space for dissent and is exercised from the position of force, the trolling-like quality of Russian diplomacy is a derivative of the domestic political culture expressed in contestation of the liberal order that the Russian regime sees as hegemonic. The Kremlin cannot unfold a fully fledged neutrollization in the international sphere. However, its international trolling strategy must be understood in relation to the one that is being constructed domestically – not so much to expose hacking antics, which have spectacular yet less than structurally profound effects, but more to reflect on the long-term effects of corruption by chaos, where value-based political antagonism becomes meaningless, or is even eliminated.