This article has two parts. The first part aims at analysing why nations are increasingly going beyond their multilateral and regional moorings to secure and advance their national interests. In doing so, why and how do they indulge in sub-regional engagements? It has been empirically seen across the board in almost every part of the world that sub-regional growth initiatives play a significant role in regional integration.

• Vikash Kumar |
• January 2017 |
• Strategic Analysis

Theorising about international relations in South Asia is a daunting task for any scholar of International Relations. The challenge lies in explaining the causal forces behind state behaviour, in order to illuminate a pattern for arriving at an understanding of these relations in a parsimonious manner.

• Medha Bisht |
• January 2017 |
• Strategic Analysis

Partly the result of a political and physical isolation compounded by decades of conflict in the region, Northeast India is often viewed through the prism of security studies, institutional performance or developmental governance. While important contributions in themselves, a state-centric focus often overlooks the complexity of the causes and dynamics. It ignores the consequences of regional societal forces’ articulation of identity, nationalism, separatism and sovereignty that can shape political boundaries in the region, thus overlooking the salience of subaltern narratives.

• Alex Waterman |
• January 2017 |
• Strategic Analysis

After the Ukrainian crisis and Russia’s actions in Crimea and Donbass, there is a growing lack of understanding about Russian interests in the post-Soviet space. Russian authorities have been accused of having a desire to expand its territory, trying to re-Sovietise the region, and using neo-imperial approaches of doing business with its neighbours. However, the genesis of Russian strategy towards post-Soviet space is much more complicated.

• Andrei Skriba |
• November 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis

On December 25 of this year we will mark 25 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many in Russia and the West were optimistic about the seeming imminent integration of Russia into a Western-led liberal democratic global order. The United States, in particular, fresh off its ‘victory’ in the Cold War, could hardly restrain its triumphalism as it stood astride the world as the sole superpower.

• Andrew C. Kuchins |
• November 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis

This article contributes to the rich body of literature on Russian security perceptions and analyses how Russian security thinking evolved over the last 20 years. The focus of the article is on how Russian security perspective shifted from the goal of assuring Russian security by integration and cooperation with the West to the idea of Russia’s own separate geo-economic project and the goal of reducing the country’s dependencies on the West. Security in this article is understood both as a military-political and as an economic phenomenon.

• Maxim Bratersky |
• November 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis

The article discusses two major trends in contemporary world politics—the disintegration of the nation-state and supranational integration—and analyses their nature, causes and significance.

• Ivan Krivushin |
• November 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis

While environmental issues attract growing interest all over the world Russia has kept aside from this trend for a long time. Its participation in international environmental cooperation has always been determined primarily by the external policy’s objectives. In Soviet times, participation in global environmental initiatives was a channel of collaboration with the West. In the 1990s, it was a means of integration into the international community and one of the major areas of cooperation with the US.

• Igor A. Makarov |
• November 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis

Although the US–Russia relations are hardly the central axis of contemporary international relations, the systemic confrontation between Moscow and Washington, which began in 2014, will become a decisive factor for the emerging international order. This confrontation was caused by factors much deeper than a mere clash of national interests in Ukraine or Syria.

• Dmitry Suslov |
• November 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis

The current crisis and pause in development of the EU–Russia relations provide a unique chance to shed the burden of past problems and start new relations from scratch. Both sides should sort out their values and get rid of the ballast generated by the bureaucratic inertia or false understandings of partnership. Russia and Europe are unlikely to evolve a common vision for the future. Their future is not in unity but in co-existing next to each other. It is time that Russia and the EU clearly formulate their real interests and try to make relations predictable.

• Timofei Bordachev |
• November 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis