This collaborative effort by Russian and American scholars documents Russian policy toward ethno-national conflict in its "near abroad," American policy toward these conflicts, and the attempts of international organizations to prevent and resolve them. Case studies consider the causes, dynamics, and prospects of conflicts in Latvia, the Crimea, the Transdniester region of Moldova, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and the region of North Ossetia and Ingushetia.
The disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in 1991 shed entirely new light on the character of their political systems. There is now a need to re-examine many of the standard interpretations of Soviet and Yugoslav politics. This book is a comparative study of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union - as multinational, federal communist states - and the reaction of European and US foreign policy to the parallel collapses of these nations. The authors describe the structural similarities in the destabilization of the two countries, providing great insight into the demise of both.
Western politicians, pundits, and the public were wholly unprepared for the violent conflicts erupting in eastern and central Europe and the former Soviet Union after the end of the Cold War. The governments emerging from communism lack both the authoritarian control to suppress domestic differences and the democratic power to manage them. Old conflicts resurfaced and new ones were kindled in virulent form from Bosnia to Chechnya. The stability of governments and the status quo of borders have been thrown into question. Actual and threatened disintegration of states in the area is widespread. No reference points have emerged to replace the cold war paradigm. Nor is there a way of knowing which conflicts can be contained within accepted borders and which may spill over. The prospect not only of widening conflict, but also of new precedents challenging old certainties of international life, causes deep concern in western Europe and the United States. Europe has many experienced international organizations under whose umbrella states organize to achieve common purposes. This book asks how they have performed that function. How are these organizations attempting to deal with the many forms of internal conflict that are both the cause and the result of the end of communism and the East-West confrontation? Despite significant organizational and financial resources, the results have been meager. The authors show how difficult it is to achieve effective joint action on a sustained basis. They contend that a concerted effort to discover how to achieve joint action is the necessary next step in mobilizing international organizations for preventing ethno-national conflict. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Diana Chigas, Jarat Chopra, Michael W. Doyle, Keitha Sapsin Fine, David S. Huntington, Christophe Kamp, Jean E. Manas, Elizabeth McClintock, John Pinder, Wolfgang H. Reinicke, Reinhardt Rummel, Melanie H. Stein, Shashi Tharoor, Thomas G. Weiss, Richard Weitz, and Mario Zucconi. A Brookings Occasional Paper
A study of superpower co-operation since World War II, this book examines the regulation of USA/USSR rivalry, and outlines the power of regional states to constrain and manipulate them for their own interests.
Finally, the book assesses the contribution of international assistance programmes to the denuclearization process under way in the former Soviet Union.
Title first published in 2003. Conflict and Security in the Former Soviet Union examines the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)'s approach to post-Cold War tensions and conflicts in the former Soviet area, the extent to which the new procedures, mechanisms and instruments developed by the organization are useful, and how the OSCE's activities may reveal innovative contributions to conflict studies.
From Moscow, the world looks different. It is through understanding how Russia sees the world—and its place in it—that the West can best meet the Russian challenge. Russia and the West are like neighbors who never seem able to understand each other. A major reason, this book argues, is that Western leaders tend to think that Russia should act as a “rational” Western nation—even though Russian leaders for centuries have thought and acted based on their country's much different history and traditions. Russia, through Western eyes, is unpredictable and irrational, when in fact its leaders from the czars to Putin almost always act in their own very predictable and rational ways. For Western leaders to try to engage with Russia without attempting to understand how Russians look at the world is a recipe for repeated disappointment and frequent crises. Keir Giles, a senior expert on Russia at Britain's prestigious Chatham House, describes how Russian leaders have used consistent doctrinal and strategic approaches to the rest of the world. These approaches may seem deeply alien in the West, but understanding them is essential for successful engagement with Moscow. Giles argues that understanding how Moscow's leaders think—not just Vladimir Putin but his predecessors and eventual successors—will help their counterparts in the West develop a less crisis-prone and more productive relationship with Russia.
Russia's controversial annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its involvement in the conflict in Ukraine have left international audiences stunned. Russia now occupies a central place on the Western security agenda and has been recast as an important area of scholarly inquiry. The conflict has raised important questions about Russia's understanding of conflict management and its approach to contemporary European security. This book provides a timely and contextual exploration of Russia's post-Soviet legacy of conflict management in the backdrop of its interaction with Europe's system of security governance. By exploring Russia's approach from the early 1990s to the present day, the book offers a comprehensive exploration into the evolution of Russian behavior, investigating whether Russia's approach has developed in accordance with the policies and practices of security governance that have emerged in the European experience of conflict management. Together with extensive documentary analysis and elite interviews, it employs the framework of security governance to examine Moscow's behavior across a set of case studies situated in the European political and security environment. It offers a timely contribution to our understanding of Russia's response to intrastate conflict and Russia's broader engagement with its contemporary security environment.
