Jules Sergei Fediunin, winner of two prizes, one for thesis, the other for research

22 March 2024
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CREE is delighted to announce that Jules Sergei Fediunin has been awarded two prizes:
- The Prix Raymond Aron pour la recherche 2023 for his thesis entitled: "Le nationalisme au service d'une nation incertaine: nouvelles tendances du nationalisme et (dé)légitimation du pouvoir dans la Russie contemporaine, 2000 - 2020", directed by Jean Radvanyi, defended in 2021 as part of the Inalco doctoral school, discipline: Sciences politiques et relations internationales.
- A Prix Jeune Chercheur from the Fondation des Treilles, for the year 2024.
Jeune homme avec des lunettes en train de lire un livre dans une bibliothèque
Portrait de Jules Sergei Fediunin © Maxime Ruscio / BULAC‎
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Doctoral fellow at Inalco and currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre d'études sociologiques et politiques Raymond Aron at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Jules Sergei Fediunin defended his doctoral thesis on December 6, 2021.

Conducted under the supervision of Jean Radvanyi, his thesis is situated at the crossroads of political science, the history of ideas and Slavic studies. It offers a nuanced conceptualization of the object "Russian nationalism", demonstrating that it represents a semantic, ideological and political battleground in Vladimir Putin's Russia. This protean nationalism is analyzed as a powerful dual-purpose repertoire: it is both a source of consolidation for an authoritarian regime and the state this regime claims to embody, and a means of challenging the established order.

After teaching at Inalco as part of a doctoral contract and then at Sorbonne University as an ATER (section 13 of the CNU), he continued his research as a post-doctoral fellow at EHESS for the years 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 to work on the relationship between war and nationalism, studied from the Russian case. In this perspective, he studies the uses of nationalism to justify and wage war in Ukraine, and contributes to reflections on the transformation of political forms through war. His previous and current research falls within CREE's "Imperial, post-imperial and post-Soviet societies" and "Modern and contemporary crises and conflicts" axes.

Since defending his thesis, he has continued to participate actively in the life of the laboratory, attending events organized by its members and publishing scientific work as an associate doctor at CREE. During the 2023-2024 academic year, he will also be teaching at Licence (CM "Histoire de l'URSS") and Master's level (seminars "Nouveaux risques et nouvelles crises en ex-URSS" and "Russie-URSS : approches pluridisciplinaires"), which come under the responsibility of Inalco's Russian Studies Department.