Russia in/and Europe: Sources of Ambiguity

Abstract

While the previous chapter offered an introduction to my project from the postcolonial perspective, the present one does the same job in relation to the disciplinary field of International Relations (IR), with the empirical focus on Russia. As I pointed out in the introduction, I am mostly interested in the approaches that view domestic and international politics as an integral whole and search for explanations at the intersections between different levels of analysis. This is still a vast body of literature to review, but this chapter concentrates on the approaches that try to account for the specificity of Russian political developments (including foreign policy) by looking at Russia’s historical experience and role in the world. This points, very broadly, in the direction of constructivist Russian foreign policy studies. I am less interested in rationalist approaches to IR and comparative politics — for the very simple reason that I have very little to say there. Constructivism, on the contrary, could significantly benefit from engaging with postcolonial theory, not just in terms of its own research agenda but also as regards the dialogue with other subfields of Russian studies (such as history, cultural anthropology and the like). This potential contribution is due to the positioning of postcolonial theory in three important respects: regarding the level of analysis, generalisability and the agency-structure problem.