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Russia’s Radical Othering in the Global Academic Discourse
Many critical scholars hold that the new Cold War is already more dangerous than its predecessor, partly due to the synergy of Western intelligence services and various hegemonic-ideological institutions—the Censorship-Industrial Complex—in demonizing Russia. Although many critical scholars agree that Western academia plays a crucial role in reproducing the hegemonic anti-Russian discourse, this paper is one of the first efforts to empirically measure how pervasive that discourse is within the academic literature. The analysis of 100 articles on the Ukraine conflict published in the Taylor and Francis academic journals shows that 62 articles explain the Ukraine conflict in terms of Russia’s aggressiveness, imperialism, autocracy and propaganda, with another 31 articles reproducing the same anti-Russian discourse implicitly.