Security Cooperation, Russia, and NATO
President Vladimir Putin’s decision to support the U.S. war against terrorism was not quite the complete turnaround in Russian foreign policy that has been portrayed in the Western media. Putin…
U.S. Assistance to Russian NGOs: Securing Global Governance from Below
This memorandum argues that President George W. Bush’s administration should complement its diplomatic rapprochement with Russia with continued, even enhanced, support for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the Russian Third Sector.…
The Myth of the New Detente: The Roots of Putin’s Pro-U.S. Policy
Over the past year, Russian president Vladimir Putin initiated a stream of diplomatic overtures to probably the most unresponsive and self-centered of U.S. administrations since the U.S. reemergence from isolationism…
Ethnofederalism: Lessons for Rebuilding Afghanistan, Preserving Pakistan, and Keeping Russia Stable
Ethnofederalism is a federal political system in which territorial governance units are explicitly designated as ethnic homelands. It has proven quite workable in multiethnic states from India to today’s Russia,…
Opposition to the War in Chechnya: Antimilitarist Organizing in Russia
Patriotism, or the devoted love of one’s country, is a phenomenon that can be used in the service of the state. Often, during wartime, the militarized aspect of patriotism is…
Imperial Designs? Citizenship and Russia’s Policies in the Former Soviet Union
The goal of Boris Yeltsin and many of Russia’s liberal democratic reformers was not the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the end of Soviet power. Russia would become the…
Why Peace Operations in Afghanistan Should Heed Soviet Lessons Learned
Common wisdom says that the United States has little to learn from studying the military lessons of Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. U.S. military actions have been designed not to encounter…
What Happens When Russia is the West’s Ally? Some Historical Geopolitical Regularities
The geopolitical history of balance of power suggests that Russia is simply too big to be the West’s ally in normal times. In a pattern that has held for more…
Policization versus Democratization: 20 Months of Putin’s ‘Federal’ Reform
“A society cannot be called civil if more than half of State servants wear a military uniform,” said Russian ombudsman Oleg Mironov at the recent Civic Forum. He explained that…
Assuaging Ethnic Factionalism Dagestan’s Lessons for Post-Taliban Settlement in Afghanistan
Studies of post-conflict settlement have shown that political decentralization rarely eliminates ethnopolitical violence. Yet, some form of decentralization often has to be used as a confidence building mechanism in the…
Suffocation by Embrace: The Putin-Bush Alliance and the Cultural Threat to Western Democracy
In the wake of the heinous terror strikes in the United States, President Vladimir Putin firmly embraced the idea of a counterterrorist alliance led by the United States/NATO and Russia.…
Putin’s Tightrope: Maintaining Support in the Face of Domestic and International Policy Demands
Watching President Vladimir Putin field the questions of high school students in Texas, that early assessments of Putin’s chances for a long political life and autonomous political action were extremely…