Russian Soft Power in Central Asia between Official Discourse and Local Practice

Abstract

After 2022, Russia's normative corpus subjects the concept of soft power to a fundamental reorientation. The language of organic attractiveness gives way to that of civilizational confrontation, while categories such as “state-civilization”, “civilizational code”, and the defence of traditional spiritual and moral values displace the universalist vocabulary that had structured Russian public diplomacy throughout the 2010s. This article examines how that doctrinal shift is being realized at the practical and communicative level in Central Asia. Drawing on poststructuralist discourse analysis and a unified analytical framework built on three operational categories - self-construction, relational positioning (in its spatial, temporal, and ethical dimensions), and the instrumentalization of culture. The study analyzes two doctrinal documents (the 2022 Humanitarian Policy Concept and the 2023 Foreign Policy Concept) alongside a corpus of Instagram posts from the Russian branches in Astana, Bishkek, and Dushanbe (2022–2026). Frame-based content analysis reveals systemic, non-random variation across the three cases and confirms a three-part typology of doctrinal implementation: filtering adaptation in Kazakhstan, gradual convergence in Tajikistan, and open transmission in Kyrgyzstan. The typology correlates with the degree of military-political integration with Russia and with the architecture of Russia's institutional presence, indicating that doctrinal enshrinement provides a repertoire that local Russian houses selectively activate.

Keywords: soft power, Russian public diplomacy, Russian houses, Central Asia, civilizational discourse, state-civilization, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan.