OUR MISSION
The Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia) is a network of over 125 academics, mainly from North America and post-Soviet Eurasia, advancing new approaches to research on security, politics, economics, and society in Russia and Eurasia. Its core missions are to connect scholarship to policy on and in Russia and Eurasia and to foster a community, especially of mid-career and rising scholars, committed to developing policy-relevant and collaborative research.
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RECOMMENDED
Preparing for the Parliamentary Elections of 2021: Russian Politics and Society (Gel’man, Lankina, Semenov, Smyth, and more)
(Russian Analytical Digest) This issue provides a broad overview of Russian politics and society in the run-up to the 2021 parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for September. In eleven shorter contributions, international experts on Russia discuss domestic and foreign affairs as well as the economy. The focus of most of them is on attempts of the Russian leadership to deal with…
Russians supported Putin’s moves in Crimea in 2014. Here’s what’s different in 2021
(Monkey Cage blog/Washington Post) Many analysts have worried in recent weeks about a large buildup of Russian military forces along the Ukrainian border. Russian troops have gathered in areas near the ongoing conflict in the Donbas, and some troops relocated to Crimea. Amid border skirmishes, warnings from the Kremlin and escalating rhetoric on Russian state-owned media, what’s going on?…
Putin’s Rules of the Game: The Pitfalls of Russia’s New Constitution
(Foreign Affairs) Obviously, 2020 was a terrible year. For Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, there was one bright spot. Putin solved his “2024 problem”—the legal constraint to standing for reelection in 2024. He did so by ramming through a constitutional overhaul that nullified the previous term limit—a special provision designed especially for him. In principle, the new rules…
In the Caucasus, There Is a Peace Agreement but Not Peace
(Jacobin) Last fall, Armenia was devastated by a six-week war with its neighbor Azerbaijan, ending in the deployment of Russian peacekeepers across the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh. Yet the “peace agreement” has done nothing to resolve the deeper reasons for the conflict, in the ethno-nationalist strife which has simmered since the fall of the USSR. Last September, while most of…
Russia’s Niche Soft Power: Sources, Targets and Channels of Influence
(Ifri) This paper argues that Russia’s soft power should be understood as a niche soft power, microtargeting some specific audiences based on four particularisms: Russia’s history and culture; its Soviet legacy; its conservative and illiberal political identity today; its status as a joker on the international scene. This strategy emerged as the product of Russia’s awareness of its…
A Weak Link in NATO? Bulgaria, Russia, and the Lure of Espionage
(Davis Center) The latest revelations about the penetration of Bulgaria’s national security bodies by Russian intelligence services have raised a host of troubling security questions for U.S. and NATO policymakers. Can Bulgaria remain a member in good standing of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)? That question came to the fore on the 19th of March 2021, when the chief public…
Russia’s Weak Strongman: The Perilous Bargains That Keep Putin in Power
(Foreign Affairs) For 21 years, Vladimir Putin has reigned supreme over Russian politics. A skillful manipulator of public opinion, he wields the blunt force of repression against opponents at home and the sharp power of cyber-operations and espionage campaigns against enemies abroad. Increasingly, Western analysts and officials portray him as all-powerful, a ruthless former KGB man who…
Special Issue: Russia’s 2020 Constitutional Reform: The Politics of Institutionalizing the Status-Quo
(Russian Politics) The articles in this issue explore the longer-term implications of Russia’s 2020 Constitutional Reform process. Assessing constitutional change from different theoretical and empirical approaches, these authors find that the constitution largely codified the status-quo as it had evolved over the past decade. The resulting institutional changes solidified the personalist…
Listen to our podcast
- In this week's PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Alexander Gorbachev about the dynamic music scene in contemporary Russia, and how free Russian musicians are to make political statements.
- In this week's PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Anton Tabakh about rising food prices in Russia, and what they might mean for Russia's current and future stability.
- In this week's episode of the PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Felix Light and Nikolay Petrov about the contemporary Communist Party of the Russian Federation, including the divisions between its leadership and membership, its attitude toward Alexei Navalny, and why it might be more than just "systemic" opposition after all.
- In this week's PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Andrei Soldatov and Tanya Lokot about the role of the internet in contemporary Russian politics, including both as a tool of the Russian opposition and as an instrument of the increasingly repressive Russian regime.
