Abstract
At a time of critical geopolitical economic changes, Russia has been pursuing different foreign policy lines on the two sides of the Eurasian landmass. On the one hand, it has been intensifying its economic ties with Asia-Pacific. On the other hand, it pursues an assertive policy against the interests of the West (e.g. in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria). In this light, this chapter aims to explain this foreign (economic) policy duality of Russia. Adopting a neoclassical realist approach and using the concept of geopolitical economy, it argues that at a time of profound global changes, the Russian elites’ perceptions regarding their country’s role in the Eurasian landmass have created such a duality. It concludes that Russian elites’ sense of geopolitical exposure and economic policy preferences have not only prompted this discrepancy in Russia’s foreign (economic) policy but also undermined the country’s great power prospects in the twenty-first century.
This chapter draws on Emre İşeri & Volkan Özdemir, “Geopolitical Economy of Russia’s Foreign Policy Duality: Lockean in Its East and Hobbesian in Its West.” Rising Powers Quarterly 2, no. 1 (2017): 53–79. http://risingpowersproject.com/quarterly/geopolitical-economy-russias-foreign-policy-duality-lockean-east-hobbesian-west. The authors would like to thank Research Assistant Ahmet Çağrı Bartan at Yaşar University for his research inputs and edits.1
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Notes
- 1.
Gilpin (1981, 39–41) proposes three (ideal) types of international changes: system change (nature of actors), systemic change (governance of system) and interactional change (interstate processes).
- 2.
As an understudied approach, geopolitical economy’s primary consideration is the distribution of political and economic power in the international system. The concept is associated with two political geographers Agnew and Corbridge (1995) examining the geographical dimensions of economic and political processes in the era of globalization. In the same vein, Desai (2013, 2016) adopts geopolitical economic approach to shed light on the evolution of the capitalist world order’s evolution and its twenty-first-century form of multipolarity. Desai’s interpretation of the concept assumes states’ central role in developing and regulating economies. States’ mutual interactions—conflicting cooperative and collusive—and the international order they create are understood in terms of the character of their national economies, contradictions and the international possibilities and imperatives they generate.
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İşeri, E., Özdemir, V. (2020). Geopolitical Economy of Russia’s Foreign Policy Duality in the Eurasian Landmass. In: Parlar Dal, E., Erşen, E. (eds) Russia in the Changing International System. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21832-4_7
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