Foreign Agents in Russia - Doria

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European court did not want to be referred to as an agent which was in conflict to the common
norm of the state representatives (Ria 2013s1). In another case the suggested killer of the former
Libyan ruler Muamar Gaddaffi, a 'foreign agent' was described as a representative of a foreign
country (Ria 2012i) but in a way that the Estonian Orthodox Church nor the Russian commissioner
of the European court do not want themselves to be referred to. Therefore a foreign agent appears to
be a pejorative representative. Then again in economical context (Ria 2013d1) the foreign agent
term was used self-declaratively by the representatives of a Russian subsidiary of a French mother
company. In this context there seemed to be uncontroversial synonymous usability between foreign
representatives and agents.
There were many discoursive “side effects” in the events that the discourses of foreign
agents on one perspective created and on the other perspective displayed themselves during the
years' time frame between July of 2012 and July 2013. In negative appearance the foreign agent
stigma was connected to vandalism towards foreign agent suspected NKOs – there was writings put
on walls of the Memorial building (Echo 2012g) and the internet homepages of the Moscow-
Helsinki group were hacked (Ria 2012u). The mass inspections of the NKOs in the spring of 2013
were reported as a consequence of the suspected foreign agent violations. The foreign agent issue
was often reported to affect to the Russian international relations causing critique in America, the
United Kingdom, France, Georgia and the European Union in general. On the other hand Chinese
were reported to be positively interested of governing NKOs by the foreign agent law. Also the
disbanding of American institutes – most importantly the USAID – was represented in media as
caused by the “foreign agent law” which adds up to the numerous events that are discoursively
connected to foreign agents.
This chapter can well be reflected to the theoretical framework presented in the previous
chapters: The problematization of the foreign agent issue is portrayed as universal by the Russian
authorities because a segment of grass root movements – the NKOs – are globally used as an
instrument of contemporary competition between sovereign states. The issue is biopolitical as it
works through the whole social life and the national body of in this case Russia. Accordingly NKOs
can cultivate socio-political disorder and extremism. However the biopolitical resistance is
government-led making the managing of the issue rather geopolitical. The use of sovereign power is
legitimized to control these possibly harmful forces in its own territory where it has also
internationally recognized right to govern. In the chapter three I presented the argument that by
creating an internal other by foreign agent discourses, the well documented project of unifying the
Russian self can be contributed. The discoursive statements presented in Russian media support this
argument by the discourses suggesting that the agenda of the foreign agents' work is to disturb the
Russian political order (Ria 2012k, 2012s).