Foreign Agents in Russia - Doria

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governing, Roberto Esposito (2008, 26) notes that rights can be seen as the instrument that the
sovereign uses for imposing his own domination by defining the actors on that field of subjects.
Following this argument, in the case of foreign agents and NKOs, the sovereign practices its power
by making these basic rights more conditioned than before as certain subjects have more
responsibilities to maintain them. In other words the sovereign rule has created a new instrument to
govern NKOs by conditioning their rights in definitions and obligations when acting as foreign
agents.
The first official definition of foreign agents does also include its indirect structural power
over the Russian life, because of the repeatability of its discourses can proliferate within the Russian
people outside of formal social institutions. Even if the codification is legally applied only onto
NKOs and consequently only NKOs can legally be claimed such, the definition can be proliferated
to concern the individual and private spheres as well. The main defining statement in the law on
NKOs is that the Russian non-commercial organizations are acting as foreign agents if they receive
non-Russian financial or material support and participating in political activities. This statement
enables ideas to define also other legal subjects than NKO's as foreign agents according to the same
definition and legitimization.
3.4.1. Outcomes of the NKO Law: Internal Other
What is the subject of foreign agents? Before the law the idea of foreign agents was only a
structural concept without any formal legal definition: whether somebody was considered foreign
agent or not, there was no fixed definition for it in Russia before the year 2012, but now through the
NKO law statements of the sovereign claim hegemony over the discourses of foreign agents – they
are in the law. The distinctive function on foreign agents in the NKO law can be linked to the
codifying or regulatory power as defined by Michel Foucault (2003, 249). Foreign agents are set to
be registered and monitored without direct 'disciplining actions' on individuals in this perspective. It
does however impose a norm of a foreign agent that not only labels the organizations - and
indirectly the people working in NKOs - but also effects on the self-conduct. When something that
the people are part of is codified as foreign, non-Russian agent, it does increase the subjects’ selfknowledge/conduct
and relations to self and others, i.e. it subjugates the Russian people dealing
with the foreign agent discourses.
This pastoral subjectivation, as Roberto Esposito (2008, 35) refers to, makes Russian
subjects consider their relations to the organizations defined acting as foreign agents. The power
here is not practiced upon the biological body of population, but the organized groups and the
political body of people. The social identity research scholars such as Michel Foucault, Thomas