Drifting elites: how post-liberalism becomes normal

How do people who once championed liberal reform come to sustain an illiberal political order?

Drawing on a book project, this talk traces the changing language and roles of Russian political, policy and academic elites from 1992 to 2022. It develops the concept of discursive drift to show how reform ideas were gradually reinterpreted as institutions and incentives changed.

Rather than treating authoritarian consolidation solely as a decision imposed from above, the talk examines the everyday, often rational adaptations through which professionals remained credible and useful within changing fields of power. Russia offers a rare view of this process, the full arc, from post-Soviet liberal aspirations to the closure of public political space by 2022. The talk considers what this case can tell us about the normalisation of post-liberal politics in Europe and the United States, while keeping the differences between these contexts in view.

Meet our speaker

Julia Taranova is a London-based political sociologist and Visiting Fellow in the Department of Management at LSE. Her research examines power, elite adaptation, and the normalisation of post-liberal order. She founded the Social Sciences Lab, a nonprofit platform supporting early-career social scientists in Russia, and previously worked on Russia’s Open Government reform and at the World Economic Forum. She holds a PhD from King’s College London and an MPP from the University of Oxford, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Financial Times, and Forbes.

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