Russia has energetically expanded its involvement in Sub-Saharan Africa in the last decade. Through a qualitative thematic analysis on a dataset of 191 English language posts from the websites of the Kremlin and the Russian MFA published between 2001 and 2023, this project seeks to describe how Russian state public diplomacy presents Russia’s relations with Sub-Saharan African nations and Africa as a whole. A typology by Bobba and Hubé (2021) was adapted, which focuses on how issues are problematised and politicised in political communication, and revolves around the categories of naming, blaming and claiming. The findings reveal that while anti-colonial and anti-Western rhetoric is prevalent in Russian state public diplomacy, themes emphasising cooperation, shared values, identity, and positive representations are even more widespread, a departure from previous research. This justified the creation of a fourth category in the typology: invoking. Combative portrayals of the West, and naming of colonialism as a problem, entered the dataset starting around 2018 for MFA posts and 2022 for Kremlin posts. From 2022, some posts also portrayed Russia as a country and Russians as a people as fellow victims of colonialism together with Africa, which was not mentioned in prior research. Further studies could apply the typology used in this thesis to include statements by Sub-Saharan African state officials, or study Russian state portrayals of relations with Russia’s Near Abroad.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-526435 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Bokstad, Isak |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutet för Rysslands- och Eurasienstudier, Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för informatik och media |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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