Nigel Gould-Davies
Biographic Data
| ID | 1006781 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nigel Gould-Davies |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nigel |
| FAMILY NAME | Gould-Davies |
| SIGNATURE | GOULD-DAVIES N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Mahidol University International College; Thailand |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 63 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Human Textures: The Personal as Geopolitical
Ukraine: The Balance of Resources and the Balance of Resolve
The third year of Russia's war in Ukraine has begun.What are the results of the first two years, and what lessons follow for the future?2022 was a year of Russian aggression and failure.Not only was Russia unable to seize Kyiv and install its own regime in the first week of the war, but in the autumn it lost huge swathes of occupied territory around Kharkiv and Kherson.By the end of the year, it held just 17.5% of the countryequivalent to 0.6% of…
The Significance of the Prisoner Exchange with Russia
How the War Has Changed Russia
Russia’s war in Ukraine is changing Russia itself. It is subordinating stability and prosperity to geopolitical obsession, and is mobilising society around active support for costly, indefinite aggression. This is breaking stabilising bargains the regime has struck at home with elites and the wider population. The system is not yet close to crisis, but the strains it faces will deepen
The Wagner Revolt: Implications for Russia, Lessons for the West
The Wagner Group's revolt against Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime, though contained, holds important implications for Russia and lessons for the West. The revolt was a full-scale crisis for the regime, reflected Putin's extraordinary misreading of domestic realities, undermined his rule's core rationale of bringing stability and security to Russia, exposed the brittleness of the Russian state, revealed weak support of Russian elites, de…
Belarus, Russia, Ukraine: Three Lessons for a Post-war Order
Belarus’s recent arc offers three wider lessons for winding down the present international crisis over the Russia–Ukraine war and for planning the post-war order. Firstly, highly personalistic rule is prone to error. The flagrancy of Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s electoral rigging ignited popular indignation, and the extreme brutality of the ensuing crackdown fanned popular outrage. Secondly, and paradoxically, autocracy is strong. Lu…
Putin's Strategic Failure
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a grand strategic error. He underestimated Ukraine’s cohesion and will to resist, the West’s unity and resolve, the vehemence of Russia’s domestic opposition and the wariness of Russian elites. While Putin’s resort to war reflected Russia’s limited options for trying to halt Ukraine’s drift away from its remaining pull, the war itself has shattered myths about Russia’s own strength. It ha…
Is Putin Doomed to Run in 2024
Even if Putin would rather enjoy his wealth than wield power, the record of post-Soviet authoritarian succession suggests that it would be safer for him to stay in power
Russia, the West and Sanctions
Sanctions have reaffirmed international norms violated by Russia and probably deterred military escalation in Ukraine
Belarus and Russian Policy: Patterns of the Past, Dilemmas of the Present
The historical pattern, as well as geopolitical and regime-security considerations, indicate that Russia is unlikely to agree to Belarus’s democratic transition
Rival power: Russia in southeast Europe
The breakup of the Soviet Union created fluidity across Eurasia. Post-Soviet states sought to put substance into their sovereignty. Central Europe hastened to rejoin the West. What about south-eastern Europe? This diverse and complex region comprises former communist countries and longstanding NATO members; Orthodox, Muslim and Catholic faiths; and Slavic, Turkic and other cultures. Russia had long sought influence there, but never controlled mor…
The politics of Eurasianism: Identity, popular culture and Russia's foreign policy
Russia emerged from the Soviet collapse as a smaller state (though still the world's biggest), bounded by unfamiliar borders and with a significant diaspora. This triggered a search for identity and place. Some hoped, briefly, that Russia might become a close partner of the West. Others predicted that ‘Weimar Russia’ would spawn a virulent ethnic nationalism fuelled by economic crisis, betrayal myths and revanchist designs. But another movement, …
All shook up: The shifting Soviet response to catastrophes, 1917–1991
Soviet communism sought to transform society and to master nature. But nature occasionally overwhelmed it. Nigel Raab's study of major Soviet disasters offers many original insights into these incidents—all but one of them earthquakes—to explore state responses and social consequences. Disasters are major crises that require urgent and improvised actions, strain resources and mobilize populations. Through official choices of publicity and suppres…
A wary embrace: What the China–Russia relationship means for the world
China and Russia's deepening relationship has provoked a wide range of views on its significance, prospects and implications for the West. Bobo Lo's concise and highly readable book offers a timely and thorough review of the issues and arguments. Until almost the end, its view is consistent and unequivocal: reports of the birth of the Sino-Russian alliance are greatly exaggerated. Lo acknowledges the case for ‘authoritarian entente’ based on shar…
Near abroad: Putin, the West and the contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus
The breakup of the Soviet Union created new states with unfamiliar borders that inherited old memories and relationships. This vast upheaval of territorial and imagined space led to a swirling confusion of legacies, identities and aspirations that will take years, even decades, to harden into stable configurations. Gerald Toal's original and thought-provoking study explores these themes through the lens of ‘critical geopolitics’: the study of how…
Dictators without borders: Power and money in central Asia
Central Asia is a remote and isolated ‘heartland’ which a new Silk Road might connect to the wider world, or so the cliché has it. Alexander Cooley and John Heathershaw's bold, provocative and lively book turns this orthodoxy upside down. The region, they argue, is already deeply connected. Not only have its states adapted to globalization, they have learned to benefit from it. Participation in the institutions, mechanisms and norms of global gov…
Seeing the future: Power, Prediction and Organization in an Age of Uncertainty
Journal Article Seeing the future: power, prediction and organization in an age of uncertainty Get access What is the future?. By John Urry. Cambridge: Polity. 2016. 200pp. £50.00. ISBN978 0 74569 653 9. Available as e-book.Selling the future: the paradoxes of predicting global politics. By Ariel Colonomos. London: Hurst. 2016. 224pp. £17.70. ISBN978 1 84904 553 7.Rethinking risk in national security: lessons of the financial crisis for risk mana…
Pluralism by default: Weak autocrats and the rise of competitive politics. By Lucan Way
In her trenchant study of the rise of Vladimir Putin (Putin's kleptocracy, Simon and Schuster, 2015), Karen Dawisha coined the memorable aphorism that Russia is an authoritarian project in the process of succeeding rather than a democratic project in the process of failing. Lucan Way's reappraisal of regime development in the former Soviet Union may be understood as a variation on this theme. He argues that different degrees of authoritarianism a…
Russia's Far East: New dynamics in Asia Pacific and beyond. By Rensselaer Lee and Artyom Lukin
Russia's Far East: new dynamics in Asia Pacific and beyond. By Rensselaer Lee and Artyom Lukin. London: Lynne Rienner. 2015. 276pp. £66.50. isbn 978 162637 389 1. Since the collapse of relations with the West in 2014, Russia has escalated its engagement with Asia. Analyses of the prospects for this pivot have focused on Russia's capacity to meet Asian interests, the resources and instruments that support this policy, and Russia's credibility as a…
Gaidar's revolution: The inside account of the economic transformation of Russia. By Petr Aven and Alfred Kokh
Next year marks both the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution and the silver jubilee of a key moment in its dismantling. In November 1991 Boris Yeltsin appointed Yegor Gaidar the acting prime minister of a country in crisis. In short order, he helped draft the Belavezha Accords that dissolved the Soviet Union, freed prices from state control, began a market transition and managed a host of other major issues. These events, in their own way hardl…
Gangs of Russia: From the streets to the corridors of power. By Svetlana Stephenson
Is Russia a ‘mafia state’? If so, what does this mean and what are its implications? Svetlana Stephenson offers a welcome and distinctive perspective on these questions in her study of Russian youth gangs and their complex transformation—as her subtitle puts it—‘from the streets to the corridors of power’. While Stephenson traces the roots of Russia's post-Soviet gangs back to village traditions of ritualized violence, her narrative begins with t…
Re-examining economic and political reforms in Russia, 1985-2000: Generations, ideas, and changes. By Vladimir Gel'man, Dmitry Travin and Otar Marganiya
Re-examining economic and political reforms in Russia, 1985–2000: generations, ideas, and changes. By Vladimir Gel'man, Dmitry Travin and Otar Marganiya. Lanham: Lexington Books. 2014. 192pp. £50.00. ISBN 978 0 73918 361 8. Available as e-book. What is the role of ideas in social and political change? This ancient question has no final answer. A few might still insist that ideas are epiphenomenal, little more than products of deeper forces, syste…
Moscow in movement: Power and opposition in Putin's Russia. By Samuel A. Greene
Moscow in movement: power and opposition in Putin's Russia. By Samuel A. Greene. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2014. 296pp. £65.00. ISBN 978 0 80479 078 9. Russian society is often seen as passive, inert and mutely suffering in the face of a repressive state. The conservative Russian historian Karamzin's famous remark, narod bezmolvstvuyet (‘the people are silent’), has become emblematic of this view. This weakness of self-organization…
The strong state in Russia: Development and crisis. By Andrei P. Tsygankov
How and why has Russia's historical development differed from the West's? Will these differences endure? Andrei Tsygankov tackles these fundamental issues, which are urgent again today, in this clear and readable work. His focus is on Russia's tradition of state strength. Tsygankov takes to task ‘Westernists’ who impose concepts and categories drawn from the West in understanding and judging his country. Russia's experience should be understood i…
Inventing truth and building power in Russia
Journal Article Inventing truth and building power in Russia Get access NIGEL GOULD-DAVIES NIGEL GOULD-DAVIES 1Lecturer and Programme Co-ordinator in International Relations at Mahidol University International College in Thailand Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 91, Issue 4, July 2015, Pages 861–869, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12344 Published: 15 July 2015
The Logic of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy
Journal Article The Logic of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy Get access Nigel Gould-Davies Nigel Gould-Davies Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, Volume 27, Issue 2, April 2003, Pages 193-214, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-7709.00347 Published: 11 March 2003
Rethinking the Role of Ideology in International Politics During the Cold War
The partial opening of East-bloc archives has sparked renewed interest in the study of ideological influences in Soviet foreign policy. The task of weighing the relative importance of ideology is complicated, however, by the failure of most scholars to develop sound evaluative criteria. This article discusses the shortcomings of previous analyses of Soviet ideology and puts forth a more theoretically coherent approach, based on three explicit cri…
A wary embrace: What the China–Russia relationship means for the world
China and Russia's deepening relationship has provoked a wide range of views on its significance, prospects and implications for the West. Bobo Lo's concise and highly readable book offers a timely and thorough review of the issues and arguments. Until almost the end, its view is consistent and unequivocal: reports of the birth of the Sino-Russian alliance are greatly exaggerated. Lo acknowledges the case for ‘authoritarian entente’ based on shar…
The intimate dance of diplomacy: In Praise of Practice
Those who study international relations pay little attention to those who practise them. But the terms of scholarly explanation—the great abstractions of state, interest, power and so on—are always embodied in human representatives, and their interactions mediated through human relationships. The daily experience, lived and felt, of diplomats thus offers a valuable perspective on how international relations work. Two recent studies by Iver Neuman…
Putin's Strategic Failure
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a grand strategic error. He underestimated Ukraine’s cohesion and will to resist, the West’s unity and resolve, the vehemence of Russia’s domestic opposition and the wariness of Russian elites. While Putin’s resort to war reflected Russia’s limited options for trying to halt Ukraine’s drift away from its remaining pull, the war itself has shattered myths about Russia’s own strength. It ha…
Seeing the future: Power, Prediction and Organization in an Age of Uncertainty
Journal Article Seeing the future: power, prediction and organization in an age of uncertainty Get access What is the future?. By John Urry. Cambridge: Polity. 2016. 200pp. £50.00. ISBN978 0 74569 653 9. Available as e-book.Selling the future: the paradoxes of predicting global politics. By Ariel Colonomos. London: Hurst. 2016. 224pp. £17.70. ISBN978 1 84904 553 7.Rethinking risk in national security: lessons of the financial crisis for risk mana…
Russia and the IMF
Russia's economic crisis in the summer of 1998 has renewed debate as to whether the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has helped, hindered or been irrelevant to economic transition in the core of the former Soviet Union. The authors examine the relationship between the Fund and Russia over the past ten years, highlighting a mixed record of successes, failures and the limits of the Fund's role. They argue that the institution may well have also in…
Ukraine: The Balance of Resources and the Balance of Resolve
The third year of Russia's war in Ukraine has begun.What are the results of the first two years, and what lessons follow for the future?2022 was a year of Russian aggression and failure.Not only was Russia unable to seize Kyiv and install its own regime in the first week of the war, but in the autumn it lost huge swathes of occupied territory around Kharkiv and Kherson.By the end of the year, it held just 17.5% of the countryequivalent to 0.6% of…
How the War Has Changed Russia
Russia’s war in Ukraine is changing Russia itself. It is subordinating stability and prosperity to geopolitical obsession, and is mobilising society around active support for costly, indefinite aggression. This is breaking stabilising bargains the regime has struck at home with elites and the wider population. The system is not yet close to crisis, but the strains it faces will deepen
Russia, the West and Sanctions
Sanctions have reaffirmed international norms violated by Russia and probably deterred military escalation in Ukraine
Near abroad: Putin, the West and the contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus
The breakup of the Soviet Union created new states with unfamiliar borders that inherited old memories and relationships. This vast upheaval of territorial and imagined space led to a swirling confusion of legacies, identities and aspirations that will take years, even decades, to harden into stable configurations. Gerald Toal's original and thought-provoking study explores these themes through the lens of ‘critical geopolitics’: the study of how…
Dictators without borders: Power and money in central Asia
Central Asia is a remote and isolated ‘heartland’ which a new Silk Road might connect to the wider world, or so the cliché has it. Alexander Cooley and John Heathershaw's bold, provocative and lively book turns this orthodoxy upside down. The region, they argue, is already deeply connected. Not only have its states adapted to globalization, they have learned to benefit from it. Participation in the institutions, mechanisms and norms of global gov…
Pacific Democracy
Rethinking the Role of Ideology in International Politics During the Cold War
The partial opening of East-bloc archives has sparked renewed interest in the study of ideological influences in Soviet foreign policy. The task of weighing the relative importance of ideology is complicated, however, by the failure of most scholars to develop sound evaluative criteria. This article discusses the shortcomings of previous analyses of Soviet ideology and puts forth a more theoretically coherent approach, based on three explicit cri…
Russia and the IMF
Russia's economic crisis in the summer of 1998 has renewed debate as to whether the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has helped, hindered or been irrelevant to economic transition in the core of the former Soviet Union. The authors examine the relationship between the Fund and Russia over the past ten years, highlighting a mixed record of successes, failures and the limits of the Fund's role. They argue that the institution may well have also in…
The Logic of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy
Journal Article The Logic of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy Get access Nigel Gould-Davies Nigel Gould-Davies Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, Volume 27, Issue 2, April 2003, Pages 193-214, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-7709.00347 Published: 11 March 2003
The intimate dance of diplomacy: In Praise of Practice
Those who study international relations pay little attention to those who practise them. But the terms of scholarly explanation—the great abstractions of state, interest, power and so on—are always embodied in human representatives, and their interactions mediated through human relationships. The daily experience, lived and felt, of diplomats thus offers a valuable perspective on how international relations work. Two recent studies by Iver Neuman…
Re-examining economic and political reforms in Russia, 1985-2000: Generations, ideas, and changes. By Vladimir Gel'man, Dmitry Travin and Otar Marganiya
Re-examining economic and political reforms in Russia, 1985–2000: generations, ideas, and changes. By Vladimir Gel'man, Dmitry Travin and Otar Marganiya. Lanham: Lexington Books. 2014. 192pp. £50.00. ISBN 978 0 73918 361 8. Available as e-book. What is the role of ideas in social and political change? This ancient question has no final answer. A few might still insist that ideas are epiphenomenal, little more than products of deeper forces, syste…
Moscow in movement: Power and opposition in Putin's Russia. By Samuel A. Greene
Moscow in movement: power and opposition in Putin's Russia. By Samuel A. Greene. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2014. 296pp. £65.00. ISBN 978 0 80479 078 9. Russian society is often seen as passive, inert and mutely suffering in the face of a repressive state. The conservative Russian historian Karamzin's famous remark, narod bezmolvstvuyet (‘the people are silent’), has become emblematic of this view. This weakness of self-organization…
The strong state in Russia: Development and crisis. By Andrei P. Tsygankov
How and why has Russia's historical development differed from the West's? Will these differences endure? Andrei Tsygankov tackles these fundamental issues, which are urgent again today, in this clear and readable work. His focus is on Russia's tradition of state strength. Tsygankov takes to task ‘Westernists’ who impose concepts and categories drawn from the West in understanding and judging his country. Russia's experience should be understood i…
Inventing truth and building power in Russia
Journal Article Inventing truth and building power in Russia Get access NIGEL GOULD-DAVIES NIGEL GOULD-DAVIES 1Lecturer and Programme Co-ordinator in International Relations at Mahidol University International College in Thailand Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 91, Issue 4, July 2015, Pages 861–869, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12344 Published: 15 July 2015
Pluralism by default: Weak autocrats and the rise of competitive politics. By Lucan Way
In her trenchant study of the rise of Vladimir Putin (Putin's kleptocracy, Simon and Schuster, 2015), Karen Dawisha coined the memorable aphorism that Russia is an authoritarian project in the process of succeeding rather than a democratic project in the process of failing. Lucan Way's reappraisal of regime development in the former Soviet Union may be understood as a variation on this theme. He argues that different degrees of authoritarianism a…
Russia's Far East: New dynamics in Asia Pacific and beyond. By Rensselaer Lee and Artyom Lukin
Russia's Far East: new dynamics in Asia Pacific and beyond. By Rensselaer Lee and Artyom Lukin. London: Lynne Rienner. 2015. 276pp. £66.50. isbn 978 162637 389 1. Since the collapse of relations with the West in 2014, Russia has escalated its engagement with Asia. Analyses of the prospects for this pivot have focused on Russia's capacity to meet Asian interests, the resources and instruments that support this policy, and Russia's credibility as a…
Gaidar's revolution: The inside account of the economic transformation of Russia. By Petr Aven and Alfred Kokh
Next year marks both the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution and the silver jubilee of a key moment in its dismantling. In November 1991 Boris Yeltsin appointed Yegor Gaidar the acting prime minister of a country in crisis. In short order, he helped draft the Belavezha Accords that dissolved the Soviet Union, freed prices from state control, began a market transition and managed a host of other major issues. These events, in their own way hardl…
Gangs of Russia: From the streets to the corridors of power. By Svetlana Stephenson
Is Russia a ‘mafia state’? If so, what does this mean and what are its implications? Svetlana Stephenson offers a welcome and distinctive perspective on these questions in her study of Russian youth gangs and their complex transformation—as her subtitle puts it—‘from the streets to the corridors of power’. While Stephenson traces the roots of Russia's post-Soviet gangs back to village traditions of ritualized violence, her narrative begins with t…
Dictators without borders: Power and money in central Asia
Central Asia is a remote and isolated ‘heartland’ which a new Silk Road might connect to the wider world, or so the cliché has it. Alexander Cooley and John Heathershaw's bold, provocative and lively book turns this orthodoxy upside down. The region, they argue, is already deeply connected. Not only have its states adapted to globalization, they have learned to benefit from it. Participation in the institutions, mechanisms and norms of global gov…
Seeing the future: Power, Prediction and Organization in an Age of Uncertainty
Journal Article Seeing the future: power, prediction and organization in an age of uncertainty Get access What is the future?. By John Urry. Cambridge: Polity. 2016. 200pp. £50.00. ISBN978 0 74569 653 9. Available as e-book.Selling the future: the paradoxes of predicting global politics. By Ariel Colonomos. London: Hurst. 2016. 224pp. £17.70. ISBN978 1 84904 553 7.Rethinking risk in national security: lessons of the financial crisis for risk mana…
A wary embrace: What the China–Russia relationship means for the world
China and Russia's deepening relationship has provoked a wide range of views on its significance, prospects and implications for the West. Bobo Lo's concise and highly readable book offers a timely and thorough review of the issues and arguments. Until almost the end, its view is consistent and unequivocal: reports of the birth of the Sino-Russian alliance are greatly exaggerated. Lo acknowledges the case for ‘authoritarian entente’ based on shar…
Near abroad: Putin, the West and the contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus
The breakup of the Soviet Union created new states with unfamiliar borders that inherited old memories and relationships. This vast upheaval of territorial and imagined space led to a swirling confusion of legacies, identities and aspirations that will take years, even decades, to harden into stable configurations. Gerald Toal's original and thought-provoking study explores these themes through the lens of ‘critical geopolitics’: the study of how…
Rival power: Russia in southeast Europe
The breakup of the Soviet Union created fluidity across Eurasia. Post-Soviet states sought to put substance into their sovereignty. Central Europe hastened to rejoin the West. What about south-eastern Europe? This diverse and complex region comprises former communist countries and longstanding NATO members; Orthodox, Muslim and Catholic faiths; and Slavic, Turkic and other cultures. Russia had long sought influence there, but never controlled mor…
The politics of Eurasianism: Identity, popular culture and Russia's foreign policy
Russia emerged from the Soviet collapse as a smaller state (though still the world's biggest), bounded by unfamiliar borders and with a significant diaspora. This triggered a search for identity and place. Some hoped, briefly, that Russia might become a close partner of the West. Others predicted that ‘Weimar Russia’ would spawn a virulent ethnic nationalism fuelled by economic crisis, betrayal myths and revanchist designs. But another movement, …
All shook up: The shifting Soviet response to catastrophes, 1917–1991
Soviet communism sought to transform society and to master nature. But nature occasionally overwhelmed it. Nigel Raab's study of major Soviet disasters offers many original insights into these incidents—all but one of them earthquakes—to explore state responses and social consequences. Disasters are major crises that require urgent and improvised actions, strain resources and mobilize populations. Through official choices of publicity and suppres…
Russia, the West and Sanctions
Sanctions have reaffirmed international norms violated by Russia and probably deterred military escalation in Ukraine
Belarus and Russian Policy: Patterns of the Past, Dilemmas of the Present
The historical pattern, as well as geopolitical and regime-security considerations, indicate that Russia is unlikely to agree to Belarus’s democratic transition
Is Putin Doomed to Run in 2024
Even if Putin would rather enjoy his wealth than wield power, the record of post-Soviet authoritarian succession suggests that it would be safer for him to stay in power
Belarus, Russia, Ukraine: Three Lessons for a Post-war Order
Belarus’s recent arc offers three wider lessons for winding down the present international crisis over the Russia–Ukraine war and for planning the post-war order. Firstly, highly personalistic rule is prone to error. The flagrancy of Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s electoral rigging ignited popular indignation, and the extreme brutality of the ensuing crackdown fanned popular outrage. Secondly, and paradoxically, autocracy is strong. Lu…
Putin's Strategic Failure
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a grand strategic error. He underestimated Ukraine’s cohesion and will to resist, the West’s unity and resolve, the vehemence of Russia’s domestic opposition and the wariness of Russian elites. While Putin’s resort to war reflected Russia’s limited options for trying to halt Ukraine’s drift away from its remaining pull, the war itself has shattered myths about Russia’s own strength. It ha…
Political science (28 works) · Law (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Politics (21 works) · Political economy (20 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Economics (13 works) · Russia and Soviet political economy (10 works) · History (9 works) · History (9 works)