War of the Future: A View from Russia Chekov, Alexander D.; Makarycheva, Anna V.; Solomentseva, Anastasia M. ...
Survival (London),
11/2019, Letnik:
61, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Russia is contemplating future war based on its current perception of allies and adversaries, largely disregarding how the world may change.
The article examines different types of macropolitical identities in Ukraine and their interaction in establishing political order in the country. The authors argue that political institutional ...design was unfavourable to the Russian diaspora in eastern and southern regions. It hindered stable development of post-Soviet identity between Russians in the country. But during the Euromaidan protests, the Russians reacted to unpleasant political situation by exploring who they were and what social and political goals they had. Having been incipient for decades, the identity of the diaspora evolved in a soaring way within three or four months. The violent actions of the newly established government in Kiev radicalized the Russian diaspora. Diasporants started establishing alternative authorities in regions where government had no monopoly on the use of force. The involvement of Russia and international volunteers complexifies the situation in Donbass and the identity formation process in unrecognized republics also known as DNR and LNR.
We revisit and empirically evaluate crucial yet under-examined arguments articulated in “God Gave Physics the Easy Problems” (2000), the authors of which emphasized that, in International Relations ...(IR) predictions, predominant nomothetic approaches should be supplemented with concrete scenario thinking. We test whether the IR predictive toolkit is in fact dominated by nomothetic generalizations and, more broadly, map the methodological profile of this subfield. We build on the TRIP database, supplementing it with extensive original coding to operationalize the nuances of predictive research. In particular, we differentiate between nomoscopic predictions (predictive generalizations) and idioscopic predictions (predictions for concrete situations), showing that this distinction is not reducible to other methodological cleavages. We find that even though in contemporary IR an increasing number of articles seek to provide predictions, they consistently avoid predictions about concrete situations. The proportion of idioscopic predictions is stably small, with an even smaller proportion of predictions that develop concrete narratives or specify any determinate time period. Furthermore, those idioscopic studies are mostly limited to a niche with specialized themes and aims. Thus, our research shows that the critical claims from 20 years ago are still relevant for contemporary IR, as the “difficult problem” of developing predictive scenarios is still consistently overlooked in favor of other objectives. Ultimately, the types of predictions that IR scholars develop depend on their specific aims and constraints, but the discipline-wide result is a situation in which international studies’ ambition to provide predictions grows, but they tend to reproduce the same limitations as they did in 2000.
Russia and the Geopolitics of Eurasia Silaev, Nikolay; Sushentsov, Andrey
Horizons: Journal of International Relations and Sustainable Development,
10/2017
9
Journal Article
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