World-making as Re-creating Reality: The “Russian World” Through the Lens of Mircea Eliade

The Kremlin’s projection of a “Russian World” beyond the borders of the Russian Federation signals the salience of alternative modes of reality-making. It represents a different register of understanding compared to the political epistemologies of liberalism and democracy. This article explores world-making as a form of reality-making, approached through Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return, The Sacred and the Profane, and Myth and Reality. In his work, the possibility of the re-actualisation of the sacred plays out within a dynamic of the secular and the sacred, (sacred) space, cyclical time, and the question of what constitutes true reality. This article then reads aspects of the “Russian World” in this register, probing whether politics could enter the role of Eliade’s “religious man,” and what this means for our understanding of contemporary (geo)politics.