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This article offers a new approach to Russian foreign policy under Putin's presidency as shifting from its 'soft power' model to what might be characterized through the prism of biopower. The author discusses the various meanings attached to the concept of attraction, and scrutinises the biopolitical turn in Russia as a domestic phenomenon and as a key element of Russia's power projection abroad. It is argued that biopolitics as a power instrument can play different roles – it can be a tool to construct Russian national (and simultaneously imperial) identity and to distinguish Russia from the West, and channel for communication with conservative forces across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the end of the Soviet period, the Russian healthcare system has been undergoing a major reform process in order to respond to changing economic, demographic, and social realities. The healthcare reform reflects the state's endeavors to gradually diminish its role as a major health service provider (and payer) by reducing public funding of the healthcare system despite its constitutional obligation to provide free healthcare to every Russian citizen in state budgetary institutions. Hovering between the guarantee of realization of the right to health in regulatory and financial terms and financial constraints, the Russian government has recently also been looking for opportunities to impose some ideological initiatives related to preventive medicine succinctly described as 'biopolitics'. In this article, the interim results of the Russian healthcare reform are analyzed and the foreign dimension of the Russian healthcare policy is introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we address geopolitics and biopower as two different yet mutually correlative discursive strategies of sovereign power in Russia. We challenge the dominant realist approaches to Russia’s neighborhood policy by introducing the concept of biopolitics as its key element, which makes analysis of political relations in the post-Soviet area more nuanced and variegated. More specifically, we address an important distinction between geopolitical control over territories and management of population as two of Russia’s strategies in its “near abroad.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article deals with civil society organizations active in the field of family policy and demographic issues in contemporary Russia. This article uses Michel Foucault's concepts of biopolitics and governmentality and later developments discussing technologies of citizenship. More specifically, using interviews, documents, and participant observations, so-called "daddy-schools" that have emerged in and around Saint Petersburg since 2008, are studied as a mode of governmentality. The analysis shows how the civic initiative studied attempted to empower fathers and how it has altered demographic discourses while approaching similar societal goals as the state does in its biopolitical strategies. Thus, the daddy-schools provide a complementary discourse concerning fatherhood while approaching the same perceived demographic crisis that the Russian state is challenged by. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]