Volunteer Empire: Participatory Propaganda in Putin’s Russia

How has geography become the central infrastructure of political authority in Putin’s Russia? Dr. Sofia Gavrilova (Fung Global Fellow, Princeton and Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography), argues that that propaganda in Russia operates less through persuasion than through participation — by enrolling ordinary people in the everyday work of imperial reproduction. At the heart of the project is the concept of the “Volunteer Empire”: an empire reproduced through organized presence, care, and curated experience. The talk draws on her own fieldwork and on a formative month she spent, as a student, at an archaeological camp in Tuva that turned out to be an early rehearsal of the very machinery her work anatomizes.