Regionalism and the Politics of Identity in Russia

Many explanations of Russia's increasingly assertive international conduct focus on changes in its strategic calculations or the global balance of power (see Sakwa 2017). This focus regularly leads Russian behavior to “surprise” the West. Why, for example, did the 2014 Ukraine crisis occur? Were there harbingers of Russian intervention there, and if so, why did the West not fully appreciate the possibility? As Eurasian Integration and the Russian World demonstrates, a social constructivist and poststructuralist perspective makes surprises like these less surprising (p. 189). It examines how the Russian establishment's discursive practices (2007–2013) ultimately constructed Russia as a “supranational rather than national community” (p. 4). Thus, instead of taking a particular crisis as the point of departure, it invites us to think of crisis as the culmination of the enduring, post-Soviet, identity-building process. This promises greater insight into the determinants of Russia's foreign policy and the characteristics that underlie

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• Russia Against the Rest

  Richard Sakwa•Russia Against the Rest•2017

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