Trickstery: pluralising stigma in international society
| Author | Anatoly Reshetnikov,Xymena Kurowska |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066120946467 |
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066120946467
European Journal of
International Relations
2021, Vol. 27(1) 232 –257
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066120946467
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Trickstery: pluralising stigma in
international society
Xymena Kurowska
Central European University, Department of International Relations, Austria
Anatoly Reshetnikov
Webster Vienna Private University, Department of International Relations, Austria
Abstract
International politics is often imagined via a binary opposition between the oppressor
and the oppressed. Attention to entrenched hierarchies of power is essential in the
study of international politics. However, taking this division too rigidly can obfuscate
the very mechanisms of power that must be understood in order to grasp these
hierarchies. We identify one such mechanism in the practice of trickstery, particularly
as practiced in the context of Russia’s ambivalent and conflicted place in international
society. Through the dynamics of trickstery, we show the workings of stigmatisation
to be a plural phenomenon, giving rise to various normative challenges. The trickster is
both conformist and deviant, hero and anti-hero – a “plural figure” both reflecting the
rich cultural texture of international society and contesting its hierarchies. The trickster
particularly unsettles the ideal liberal (global) public sphere through its simultaneous
performance of emancipatory and anti-emancipatory logics. In this, trickstery produces
normatively undecidable situations that exceed the analytical capacities of, for example,
the strategic use of norms, norm contestation, and stigma management literatures. We
find trickstery to be encapsulated in the contemporary international situation of Russia,
while recognising that its practices are potentially available to other actors with similarly
liminal status and cultural repertoires. We particularly analyse the trickster practice of
‘overidentification’ with norms, which apparently endorses but indirectly subverts the
normative frameworks within which it is performed. Such overidentification is a form
of satire, contemporaneously appropriated by state actors, which has indeterminate yet
significant effects.
Corresponding author:
Xymena Kurowska, Central European University, Quellenstraße 51, 1100 Vienna, Austria.
Email: kurowskax@ceu.edu
946467EJT0010.1177/1354066120946467European Journal of International RelationsKurowska and Reshetnikov
research-article2020
Article
Kurowska and Reshetnikov 233
Keywords
Trickstery, norms, diplomacy, stigma, culture, satire
Introduction
On 1 April 2017, the Russian Foreign Ministry posted a caricature of an automated
answering message, in Russian and English, on its official Facebook page: “To use the
services of Russian hackers, press 2; to request election interference, press 3” (Hemment,
2017: 77, ft 32). Interpreted via conventional understandings of statecraft, ridiculing
one’s own status as a perceived ‘hacking power’ by parodically embracing it on social
media can only be baffling. Satire, prevarication and ambiguity about the truth are, how-
ever, common features of Russia’s contemporary diplomatic discourse. When asked by a
journalist about the presence of Russian troops in Donbas in 2014, the Russian Defence
Minister Sergey Shoygu, for example, replied cryptically: ‘It is very difficult to look for
a black cat in a dark room, especially if it is not there. All the more stupid to look for it
there if this cat is clever, brave and polite’ (Shoygu cited in Lenta.ru, 2014; Polovinko,
2017).1 Shoygu’s reply simultaneously denies and confirms the presence of Russian
troops in the southeast of Ukraine but also goes beyond the long-familiar ‘neither con-
firm nor deny’ rhetorical trope of statecraft. In cases such as this, the issues at hand are
of the utmost gravity—war and the breach of fundamental norms of international soci-
ety—yet parody takes over. These actions may be a scene of performing ‘misrecogni-
tion’—that is, the dissonance between how actors recognise themselves and how they are
recognised intersubjectively, with humour easing the tension and generating a (false)
sense of superiority (see Adler-Nissen and Tsinovoi, 2019). However, we are invited to
laugh not only with but also at the joker, whose parodic objective cannot control how the
joke will be received. This paper suggests the concept of trickstery to make sense of such
situations.
Trickstery straddles and pluralises two important interpretations: that of Russia’s
deviancy in international society2 that reinforces hegemonic norms (Morozov and
Rumelili, 2012; Neumann and Pouliot, 2011; Zarakol, 2011), on the one hand, and that
of a ‘subaltern empire’ that ruthlessly colonises its own periphery while cultivating a
sense of its victimhood by the West, on the other (Morozov, 2015). The plural figure of
the trickster maintains, in productive analytical tension, the images both of Russia as
oppressor and as marginalised, while it also elucidates Russia’s theatrical invocations of
international law that have earned Russia’s UN delegates the epithet of ‘the professionals
of confusion’ (Security Council UN, 2017: 4).
Trickstery holds a mirror to hierarchies in international society and unearths contro-
versies hidden in its core, thereby exposing double standards and heightening awareness
of discrimination. Political openings by the trickster figure, such as creativity in liminal-
ity and transgression in satire, cannot, however, be simply celebrated, as they oscillate
between playfulness and violence. They are poorly understood if framed through the
binary of either emancipation or reproduction of domination. Trickstery can be made
conceptually visible, however, via Weber’s critique of stigmatisation as ‘not just exclud-
ing plural subjects but also including plural subjects as singular subjects’ (Weber, 2016:
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