Four articles look at Dugin's use of Heidegger, two articles at his Fourth Political Theory, one at his use of Armin Mohler's “conservative revolution,” and one at his apparent abandonment of Eurasianism. Five look at his impact abroad: in the West, in the Middle East, in the Global South, in China, and online. One looks at Queer theory (see earlier post here), and one at apocalypticism. Only one focuses on Dugin’s Traditionalism, which many of the the rest ignore, and that is Mark Sedgwick, “Aleksandr Dugin’s Traditionalist roots,” discussed here.
The same issue also contains five short papers about the meaning of conservatism, fruit of a round table on this issue. Most do not mention Dugin, but all are interesting. The paper that does mention Dugin, Artemy Magun's “Conservatism and the dialectic of ideology” (here), notes that conservativism in Russia has become more radical, with Dugin as the latest in the line from Fyodor Dostoevsky through Ivan Ilyin, Lev Gumilyov, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Magun summarizes this conservatism as “aggressive counterrevolution, the unique path and values of Russia as a culture and ‘civilization’ (‘Sonderweg’), traditionalism in contrast to moral experimentation, the capitalist materialism of the West, and to the emphasis on the positive, good, and normal models as opposed to ‘Western perversity.’” It is, he argues, a coherent idea. He also notes that “the moral panic that the specter of a serious conservatism… induces in some English-language literature is counterproductive.”
For Heidegger, Jeff Love, in “Dugin’s masks,” (available here) shows how Dugin’s interpretation of Heidegger is combined with Plato to produce a “philosophy of chaos.” It ends by identifying contradictions between Dugin’s philosophy and his political action. Maja Soboleva, in “From the ‘Russian idea’ to the ‘Russian World’” (available here, open access) looks at the development of the “Russian idea” as a basis for Russian national identity, and the role of Dugin in introducing Heidegger into later conceptions of the Russian idea, which in turn “correlates with the myths that later found their way into Putin’s catalog of traditional values.” These are characterized as “a peculiar mythologized metaphysical pseudo-Heideggerian realism.” The presence of these ideas in Putin’s “catalog,” as Soboleva does not say, might be one basis for answering the heated question of Dugin’s real influence in contemporary Russia. Gregory Fried, in “'Something wicked this way comes': the neo-fascist mobilization of Martin Heidegger in the Nationalist International” (available here) deals, as the title says, with the uses of Heidegger by the Global New Right, not just by Dugin, to whom one section is devoted. Finally, Daniil Koloskov, in “Russian Dasein: Dugin’s reading of Heidegger and the possibility of 'cultural Dasein'” (available here) argues that Dugin's reading of Heidegger "runs counter to the basic meaning of Heidegger’s early project and remains non-Heideggerian in spirit. All useful and interesting.
For the Fourth Political Theory, in “Old wine in a postmodern bottle: Aleksandr Dugin’s ‘Fourth political theory’ and Aurel Kolnai’s War against the West” (available here, open access), Matthew Sharpe argues that the Fourth Political Theory is just a revised version of Nazism, as understood by the liberal Austrian philosopher Aurel Kolnai (1900-1973). Ronald Beiner, in “Alexander Dugin: philosopher or ideologue?” (available here) also argues that the Fourth Political Theory is no more than rebranding. Beiner made the same argument in his chapter on Dugin in his 2025 boook on Radical Right Ideologues in the Age of Trump: Heralds of Nihilism. I myself am not so sure, nor am I sure that Kolnai's definition of Nazism is the best one to use.
Michael Meng, in “Dugin’s apocalypticism: Western or Russian?” (available here, open access) looks at classic models of apocalypticism from Thucydides and Plato to Augustine and Hitler, and concludes that unlike these models Dugin is most concerned with averting the destruction of Russia’s “mythic position between East and West.” Meng does not mention the Traditionalism that informed Dugin’s original and early interest in the apocalypse, and I am not sure his conclusion is entirely right.
Emmanuel Faye’s “A strategy of exoneration? Armin Mohler, Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin on the ‘conservative revolution’, National Socialism, and the SS” (available here) is only partly devoted to Dugin, as it deals at length with Mohler’s construction of the alleged “conservative revolution” and its reception by de Benoist before he gets to Dugin. Part of the point of Mohler’s construction was to exonerate “a whole host of National Socialist authors, beginning with Carl Schmitt,” and including Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger. The main difference between Dugin on the one hand and Mohler and de Benoist on the other was that, unlike them, Dugin “was not concerned to distance himself from Nazism at any price,” and in fact praised the Waffen SS as “a kind of intellectual oasis at the heart of the National Socialist regime.” Faye is one exception to the general rule that articles other than Sedgwicks’s “Aleksandr Dugin’s Traditionalist Roots” ignore Traditionalism, as he notes in passing that Dugin was a Traditionalist and that his Fourth Political Theory draws on Guénon as well as Jung and Heidegger.
It is Nicola Guerra who proposes that Dugin has abandoned Eurasianism, in "From neo-Eurasianism to Trumpism: Aleksandr Dugin and the making of conservative internationalism" (available here). If it has happened, this would be a major change since, as Guerra says, it is Eurasianism that brought Dugin to public attention in the first place. The argument is based on recent comments by Dugin, and also on the fact that his English-language social media activities have recently mostly abandoned classic Eurasian themes and now repost a lot of MAGA content. Guerra also points out that Dugin has concede that the project of Eurasian integration in the post-Soviet space has filed, despite President Putin’s best efforts.
In 2025 Dugin’s Facebook channel announced that “Trump clears the path towards multipolarity. Aleksandr Dugin maintains that Trump’s UN speech has destroyed the illusion of a liberal world order.” In my own view, this is not so much the abandonment of Dugin’s earlier positions as a note that what he had so long railed against—the hegemony of monopolar American liberalism—has fallen. Instead, “Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Narendra Modi embody ancient civilizations [Confucian and Vedic] that now assert their sovereignty within their own value systems.” Just as Dugin had hoped for years.
Guerra writes “Dugin has not merely abandoned the neo-Eurasianist framework and its attendant geopolitical logic, but has also realigned his ideological orientation toward the American Alt-right, illiberal conservatism, the Alt-lite, and the Bannonite ideological milieu—positions that are fundamentally at odds with the theoretical and strategic premises underpinning his earlier neo-Eurasianist corpus.” He refers to an earlier article of his, "The Russian-Ukrainian war has shattered the European far right: The opposing influences of Steve Bannon and Aleksandr Dugin," in European Politics and Society 2024, available here. In this he argues that although many observers lump Bannon’s and Dugin’s ideologies together, they are in fact profoundly different, as “Bannonian traditionalism is markedly Christian and identifies Islam as an enemy… [while] Dugin’s traditionalism, which can in no way be separated from his project of creating a Eurasian empire, is instead polyreligious.” Bannon’s perspective, he further argues, is ethnic, perhaps even white supremacist, while Dugin’s is multi-ethnic.
This is true, if one accepts Guerra's take on Bannon, except that in my view Dugin’s Traditionalism can and should be separated from his Eurasian project. Endorsement of Trump as the person who destroyed unilateral American power and the hegemonic liberal project does not constitute an acceptance of Christian white supremacy or an abandonment of multi-ethnic perennialism.
Finally, for reception, several articles are co-written with Marlene Laruelle.
The West is covered by Erik Piccoli in "The Dugin network: multipolarity, traditionalism, and transnational liaisons in the West" (available here). He looks at France, where Dugin's earliest contacts were, and then at Spain, Italy, and the US. He focuses on networks, not thought, though he does concede that the publishing house Arktos, which translates Dugin's works on all topics, may actually be more important than any ot the networks, though of course French, Spanish and Italian networks also publish translations. In terms of networks, he sees Dugin as "an intermediary between the Russian state and sympathetic groups abroad." He argues that what has mattered most since the invasion of the Ukraine is Dugin's geopolitics, as a result of which he appeals to pro-Russian groups irrespective of other factors. It is about multipolarity (the alternative to American unipolarity) more than Traditionalism. Piccoli identifies individuals and small groups in each country that have welcomed Dugin and promoted him and his work.
Four countries in the Global South are discussed by Marlene Laruelle and Arsenio Cuenca in "Russia’s metaphysical diplomat: Dugin’s ideological circulation in the Global South" (available here). They are India, Brazil, Argentina, and West Africa. In all four countries Dugin has been well received, in India by the government (it seems) as a semi-official representative of Russia, in Brazil by the rightist group Nova Resistência (New Resistance), in Argentina by the Peronists. In these three cases the interest is mostly political. In West Africa, however, it is Traditionalism that matters, as Dugin's strongest relationship is with Kémi Séba, a widely popular Pan-Africanist who not only credits Guénon for his conversion to Islam but also incorporates Traditionalism in his political and cultural theory. More work remains to be done on Séba.
China is a different matter, covered by Marlene Laruelle and Victor Liu in "Civilizational dissonance: Alexander Dugin and the limits of Sino-Russian ideological convergence" (available here). This is the most political reception of all. It started in 2018, when Dugin was invited to China and promoted as a lecturer by prominent policy thinkers like Zhang Weiwei and Wang Wen, who presented him as the “philosopher of multipolarity.” He was then received enthusiastically on social media in 2022 as China and Russia became closer following the invasion of Ukraine, and Chinese media started to present the war as against Western positions. The following year, however, opinion turned, mostly because Dugin’s earlier and somewhat Russo-centric and hostile positions on China in his Geopolitics became known, and to some extent also because his “metaphysical worldview” were discovered and rejected.For the Middle East, Kamal Gasimov and Marlene Laruelle contribute “Eurasia and eschatology. Dugin’s antiliberal resonances in the Muslim world” (available here, open access). The article in fact covers Turkey, the eastern Arab world, and Iran, not the Muslim world as a whole, but the countries it does cover, it covers well and in detail. Traditionalism is most important for Dugin's reception in Iran, but “his elaboration of a doctrine deeply rooted in esoteric, occultist, and eschatological traditions as well as geopolitics” matters everywhere, “allowing him to translate current transformations of the international order into a metaphysical language.” Beyond this, Dugin's view of the West fits comfortably with well-established Middle Eastern experiences of Western imperialism and his anti-modernism fits well with equally well-established Middle Eastern views of the West as a source of atheism and moral depravity. This matters more, in the view of Gasimov and Laruelle, than the details of his more recent political theory, though of course general views of political relations with Russia also matter. It is going too far, however, to say that Dugin is not “an exporter of a coherent doctrine but... a cipher through which diverse publics negotiate their own ideological positions vis-à-vis liberalism and the West.” His Traditionalist-based critique of the West and modernity placed in opposition to the esoteric is, in fact, a coherent doctrine, and Dugin is no more a cipher than any other philosopher.
A final article on reception is “Dugin as digital influencer: symbolic authority and media ecosystems” by Marlène Laruelle and Dusan Bozalka, available here. This is one of the most interesting articles in the special issue, arguing that what matters is not so much Dugin’s thought or even its institutional connections and backing but the way it circulates online. This approach is a new idea for some, but has become well accepted among others. The article examines Dugin’s online presence using variously technically sophisticated tools, looking at his Telegram channels and his major websites. This analysis shows us Dugin’s thought, or at least his online messaging, from an entirely new perspective. It also shows where this online messaging is received: most of all among Russian speakers, in the Francophone world, Latin America, the Anglosphere, and also among readers of Serbian, Italian, German, Turkish, Polish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Dutch, Finnish, and Ukrainian.
The major themes of Dugin’s online messaging, Laruelle and Bozalka find, are multipolarity, “which calls for the decline of Western hegemony and the establishment of a world order in which sovereign civilizations coexist on equal footing, each maintaining its own spiritual and cultural integrity,” followed by the rejection of liberal modernity, which draws heavily on Traditionalist understandings, and “is rooted in the idea that liberalism is not just a political model but a spiritual disintegration.” Beyond these come “the weaponization of aesthetics and political theology,” an idea that is only discussed briefly.
All these channels not only post Dugin’s own materials but also republish materials from other networks, including the Latin American channels like Novaresistenciabrasil and NostraAmerica. Messaging is also adapted to each language audience, with French readers encountering “Europe’s spiritual decline [and] the betrayal of French Christian identity by laïcité,” Latin Americans learning of US neocolonialism, and the US audience reading of “cultural Marxism” and “the ‘Orthobro’ phenomenon— a loosely defined digital identity that valorizes Eastern Orthodoxy, traditional masculinity, hierarchical social order, and pre-modern aesthetics.” “This eclectic mix… provides Dugin’s ecosystem with a cross-ideological range that strengthens its claim to intellectual authority across both the far-right and dissident left,” in the view of Laruelle and Bozalka.
