Contemporary Russian Foreign Policy (DHP-D282)

Fall 2024 · DHP D282 · Tufts University · 3 credits · Undergraduate

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 became a watershed moment in the evolution of the Russian state and its relations with the outside world. The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war has made irrelevant many approaches to analyzing Russian foreign policy that were popular before the February 2022 invasion. With this in mind, our course will provide a systematic review of the schools of thought on the sources and outcomes of Russia’s post-Cold War foreign policy. We will study key concepts, cases, and personalities to understand the impact of the main long-term drivers of Russian foreign policy: historical legacies, identity politics, leader worldviews, domestic governance, economy, bureaucratic processes, education, social mobility, and others. As we go through several key cases in the second part of the course, we will seek to understand the extent of continuity in Russian foreign policy goals and potential for their change. With the benefit of hindsight, we will assess the adequacy of the explanations and forecasts offered by top analysts before the onset of the full-scale Russo-Ukrainian war: which of them proved prescient and which of them missed the direction Russia was headed, and why? Finally, we will look to develop approaches to modeling the future of Russia’s place in the world and its foreign policy, depending on the key variables that we will work to identify.

Course codes: DHP-D282

Course Discovery