Kalugina Galina

№ 2, 2010

• LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND TRANSFORMATION OF DISCOURSE OF “NATIONAL POLICY” IN POST-SOVIET EPOCH Case of Irkutsk

  The article is devoted to the analysis of the changes in the discourse of the “national policy” in the Russian regions. The author in her research paper proposes a hypothesis that the political fears at the federal level caused by the hypothetical chance of the country’s collapse due to the “national factor” have transformed at the regional level into the system of power decisions and institutional innovations connected to the local conflicts. The acceptance of the discourse transmitted from the federal center appeared to be a condition under which the local problem could be heard and comprehended. At the same time, this discourse constituted the basis for the conceptualization of the reality being radically different from the one that aroused political fear. As a result, the regional discourse has seen the emergence of a specific two-layer structure being both a problem (since it was necessary to determine the piece of the reality that might be conceptualized in the framework of the “national issue”) and a resource (since the conceptualization process of the selected piece of the reality inevitably leads to its reformatting that changes the “funnel of opportunities”).

  DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-2010-57-2-91-106