Aidar Sultanov: A ‘Russian European Intellectual’ Against the Formidable ‘Sacrifice of Security to Security’

Abstract

This work explores the works of the renowned Russian legal scholar and human-rights activist Aidar R. Sultanov. In doing so, we will use an original methodology for our analysis of transnational intellectuals to consider Sultanov’s work in the light of the following four approaches: the ‘we dimension’; the dimension of ‘significant others’; ‘historical narratives’; and key ‘spatial narratives’. We concentrate our analysis not only on Sultanov as a legal scholar and human-rights activist but, even more broadly, as a public intellectual, some of whose cultural and philosophical premises have remained implicit but ones which we believe need to be explored openly and in a broader context. These philosophical premises are taken into consideration, in this article, so as to speculate about the following: what elements of Sultanov’s worldview belong to that of a transnational intellectual and, also, what prompts him to feel obliged to take a stand against attempts to securitize human rights at the national level in the Russian Federation?