Hybrid Power and the Real Russian Realists

... society, arguing that moral, intellectual, ethical and cultural hegemony—as distinct from domination—fought for and established precisely on the plane of civil society, was the only guarantee of prevailing over the enemy. Prof. Joseph Nye’s ‘soft power’ is an unacknowledged, much belated, and greatly oversimplified derivative of Gramscian ‘hegemony’. A drastic demolition of an earlier network of trenches and apparatuses of para-state nature has given rise to a deficit of “hybrid power”. This has proved to be an obstacle for the Russian State in the face of its adversary, who is seeking to deprive them of the geopolitical and geostrategic space commensurate with Russia’s weight, role, self-respect and existential drives ...