Description
Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, albeit to different degrees and through distinct strategies, have emerged as two of the most significant challengers to the Western political order and its social imaginary. Since the 2010s, both leaders have increasingly foregrounded civilizational discourses and post-imperial imaginaries that shape domestic politics and legitimise assertive foreign policy. This article takes Putin and Erdoğan as a comparative case study to critically examine the political discourses through which Russkiy mir and neo-Ottomanism function as populist projects that moralise geopolitics and normalise states of exception. Theoretically, it advances a synthetic framework that integrates Laclau’s theory of hegemony, Lacanian notions of affect and jouissance, and Ontological Security Theory to explain how civilizational imaginaries are discursively constructed, affectively invested, and routinised as security practices. Methodologically, the study employs comparative discourse analysis of speeches, strategic doctrines, ministerial statements, and emblematic policy episodes from the 2010s onward, operationalising how both leaders articulate hegemonic discourses and affective post-imperial narratives and tracing their translation into foreign policy practices. Empirically, the paper shows that both regimes converge on
anti-Western exceptionalism, charismatic leadership, and moralised geopolitical repertoires, while diverging in their grammars of belonging and in the foreign policy instruments they employ. It argues that costly and escalatory foreign policy routines persist because of their affective returns, particularly the forms of enjoyment derived from attempting to “repair”imperial loss and from promising renewed jouissance. The article contributes both a transferable analytical toolkit for studying post-imperial populist foreign policy and a refined account of how identity work and affect sustain adventurous external behaviour under conditions of ontological insecurity.
