Despite the long history of Muslims in Russia, most scholarly and political literatures on Russia’s Islam still narrowly interpret Muslim-Slavs relations in an ethnic-religious oppositional framework. In my work, I examine Russia’s discourse on Islam to argue that, in fact, the role of Islam in post-Soviet Russia is complex. Drawing from direct sources from academic, state, journalistic, and underground circles, often neglected by Western commentators, I identify ideational patterns in conceptualizations of Islam and reconstruct relational networks among authors. To explain complex intertextual relations within specific contexts, I utilize an analytically eclectic method that appropriately combines theories from different paradigms and/or disciplines. Thanks to my multi-dimensional approach, I show that, contrary to traditional views, Russia’s Muslims participate in processes of post-Soviet Russia’s identity formation. Starting from textual contents, avoiding pre-formed analytical frames, I argue that many Muslims in Russia perceive themselves as part of Russian civilization – even when they challenge the status-quo. Building on my initial findings, I state that a key element in Russia’s conceptualization of Islam is the definition, elaborated in the 1990s, of traditional Islam as part of Russian civilizational history, as opposed to extremist Islam as extraneous, hostile phenomenon. The differentiation creates an unprecedently safe, if confined, space for Islamic propositions, of which Muslims are taking advantage. Embedded in debates on Russian civilization, conceptualizations of Islam, then, influence Russia’s (geo)political self-perceptions and, consequently, its domestic and international policies. In particular, Russian so-far neglected Islamic doctrine supports views of Islamic terrorism as a political and not religious phenomenon. Hence, Russia interprets both terrorism and counterterrorism within its own historical tradition, causing its strategy to be at odds with Western views. Less apparently, these divergences affect Russian-U.S. broader relations. Finally, in revealing the civilizational value of Russia’s Islam, I expose intellectual relations among influential subjects who share the aim to devise a new civilizational model that should combine Slavic and non-Slavic, Orthodox and Islamic, Western, and Asian components. In this old Russian dilemma, the novelty is Muslims’ participation.

The modern globalizing world is being shaped by transformational processes that permeate through all the spheres of society life. The struggle for limited resources have never been removed from the agenda of the leading economic powers. At the same time, their methods have been taking a different shape: the times of military confrontations have yielded to the era informational, geopolitical and geoeconomic wars. These phenomena determine the trends of world economy development and actualize the problem of protecting national economic interests. This study was conducted in order to analyze modern transformational processes and strategic mechanisms of providing national economic security aimed at sustainable development of society. It was shown that the processes occurring in society should be analyzed through a "civilizational prism". From that perspective culture is seen as the holding element of the informational matrix, representing a medium through which a society can be governed. The paper reconsiders the idea of economic security from conceptual viewpoint, based on reproduction approach, theory of conflicts management and modeling methods of game theory. Besides, in order to achieve compatibility of various economic security indicators, novel mathematical models were used, allowing for a comprehensive analysis. The results of applying the mathematical models in regard to the economic security of Russia demonstrated, that despite some particular positive shifts (mainly in financial sphere), the country is still facing many internal and external threats. A new Russian strategy of long-term socio-economic development is intended to improve the situation. It is aimed to solve three crucial problems, which are the creation of equal opportunities for people, encouraging innovative behavior and a considerable enhancement of economy efficiency.