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Dr hab. Wiktor Werner (Prof. AMU, Poznan, Poland) The Confluence of Historical Revisionism, Political Radicalism, and Militarism in Contemporary Russian-Imperial Culture: A Time-Sensitive Network Perspective
1. Research problem & context Analyse how historical revisionism, political radicalism, and militarism intersect in Putin’s neoimperial culture. Show that this is not a purely “internal Russian” phenomenon but a hub in a global radical-right ecosystem.
2. Theoretical background & previous work ●Build on the earlier paper (Werner–Dieriabin– Vovchuk) mapping networks of people, organisations, media and states. ●Starting claim: Russian political radicalism is largely a Russianised adaptation of Western farright and Christian Right ideas, not an isolated invention.
http://eehb.dspu.edu.ua/article/view/311495
3. New contribution of this study Extend the analysis to state-level networks (state-tostate SNA). Introduce a time-sensitive approach with four periods: ●1945–1991 ●1991–2014 ●2014–2022 ●After 2022 (preliminary results) Main question: How does Russia’s structural position in this network evolve across these periods?
4. Data & method ●Corpus of ~145 scholarly and journalistic sources → manually coded influence relations (Auth: Antoni Dieriabin, supervised by Wiktor Werner) ●Aggregation to state of origin → state of influence. ●Directed graphs for each period. ●Metrics: 1) density, reciprocity, degree assortativity, 2) node-level centralities (strength, betweenness, closeness, combined centrality score), 3) share of edges involving Russia (by count and weight), 4) strength concentration (max / mean).
5. Key results: ●1945–1991: multipolar, relatively dense network; Russia/USSR important but not dominant; moderate centralisation. ●1991–2014: expansion + Russia as a super-hub; high reciprocity, intensive exchange; over 60% of total edge weight involves Russia. ●2014–2022: network becomes sparser, hub–periphery pattern strengthens; about half of all ties involve Russia → stabilised dominance. ●After 2022: small, narrow core; low reciprocity, nearly 70% of total edge weight involves Russia; Russia as primary broadcaster, not a symmetric partner.
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●Research funded by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) under grant title “Historical narratives in Web 2.0 as a functional element of national identities in Central and Eastern Europe” (2020/39/B/HS3/01237). ●[email protected]l ●https://x.com/drWiktorWerner ●https://zenodo.org/records/17716221 ●10.5281/zenodo.17748317