Strategic Analysis

China’s aggressive rise and strained relations with its Asia-Pacific neighbours—a region with immense economic and strategic potential—have forced the US to forge a strategy of Asian rebalance. Besides making China suspicious, this strategy has aroused the possibility of a new cold war. In contrast, though India’s relations with China have improved considerably since the 1962 War, the unresolved border issue and the threatening Chinese attitude do not allow India to trust China.

• Annpurna Nautiyal
• January 2017 |
• Strategic Analysis
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The article discusses the changes in Russia’s policy towards Asia, arguing that Russia’s pivot to Asia is a reality, one that is motivated by both political and economic interests. And although that shift is not progressing as quickly as some might want and occasionally encounters difficulties, the process has definitely begun and is in all likelihood irreversible. Only a small, marginal segment of Russian society continues to dream of unity with Europe—which itself has entered a period of severe crisis.

• Alexander Lukin
• November 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis
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A lot of literature has appeared in recent years on how Russia and China have come to present a common challenge to the US-led world order. But the author of the book Power Politics: How China and Russia Reshape the World, Rob de Wijk, has propounded a different theory to prove a case rather in an ominous way that the old-style power politics has never gone away from the global scene even after the end of the Cold War.

• P. Stobdan
• November 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis
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Eurasia’s preponderance in global politics is gaining because of its location, resources, as well as mosaic population having diverse ethnic backgrounds. Since the invasion by the Mongolians in the 13th century, Eurasia as a geopolitical unity, attempted by Chengiz Khan, has been the foundation for Russia’s policies towards this region, which has been a hotbed of competition among the Persian, Turkic and Russian Tsarist empires, and the British Empire also competed for influence in the region.

• Nalin Kumar Mohapatra
• November 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis
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