Sovereigntism, Anti-Corruption Messianism, and Developmental Logjams. Patterns of Populist Mobilization in the Post-Soviet Space

What do populist mobilisations in Russia, Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia have in common? Building on the sociology and political economy of populism beyond the Western hemisphere, the paper explores a mode of conflict between an externally oriented sovereigntist and an internally oriented anti-corruption populism as a political cleavage that has been both surprisingly salient and extremely powerful in its potential for mobilisation in the post-Soviet space. While the sovereigntist project promises to regain unconditioned, national freedom of manoeuvre, anti-corruption messianism aims at developmental salvation through the elimination of corrupt behaviour in what it perceives as a fundamentally flawed system. Empirical analyses of populist mobilisations across the post-Soviet space show the appearance of both projects in either an incumbent form ‘from above’ or as oppositional movements challenging those in power ‘from below’. Although constituting powerful strategies of mobilisation and solidarity-forging under institutional and socio-economic conditions in which other sources of political articulation are either blocked or have been exhausted, both projects have failed thus far, however, to tackle the core problem at the heart of social disintegration, stagnation and, therefore, political frustration: the absence of feasible developmental strategies capable of overcoming the dual post-Soviet logjam of neoliberalism-cum-oligarchy. The paper discusses this salient populist cleavage against the background of the 21st-century socio-economic trajectories of Russia, Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia.