On December 18 President Vladimir Putin gave his traditional end-of-year holiday speech. Think of it as a Russian version of the American State-of-the-Union address always given by our President. In it Putin expressed dismay and concern at the manner in which Russia’s “Western partners” were behaving, even going so far as to declare Western intentions as being purposely aimed at controlling Russian national resources and leaving Russia a de facto vassal state. He vividly used the...
So the United States Senate has released its report highlighting extreme and supposedly ‘abhorrent’ techniques used on terrorist targets after 9/11 to glean greater intelligence and information. Since that release there has been an orgy of oscillating condemnation/hand-wringing with rationalization/chest-beating, depending on whom you speak with. What strikes me more is the whole surreal ridiculousness of this false debate.
I say false debate because in some ways this just highlights...
Anyone who has worked through post-mortems on the Iraq war is familiar with the pitfalls associated with ‘groupthink’ and preconceptions. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the few modern examples of consensus across American partisanship. Some have argued such assumptions emerged from an administration not interested in counter-arguments and alternative information. Others pointed to embedded preconceptions within the Intelligence Community itself, making it impossible to jump off the analytical...
Common complaints within Intelligence Studies about the examination of foreign intelligence communities, especially those not residing in the west, run the gamut from being too historically driven to being completely ahistorical and thus nothing more than a simple organizational review of facts and details to being too often inevitably compared against a standard framework that uses either the United States or the United Kingdom as the backdrop. While these analyses are all important, they have failed...
... School of Economics, to talk about the new textbook published under his guidance and his education methods.
Dr. Bordachev, how would you describe your textbook’s academic innovations?
Due to underlying historical reasons, the Soviet science of international relations existed within the rigid boundaries of the Marxist-Leninist paradigm, with the entire expert community either unaware or deprived of vibrant Western theories.
After 1991, many Russian foreign policy experts turned to works by their ...
Applying the “predator-prey” model to the system of international relations
The crisis in relations between Russia and the West, the advance of ISIS, and the arms race in the Asia-Pacific region all point to a potential shake-up of the world order. Shake-ups of this kind tend to be of a catastrophic ...
This work is about how a specific conceptualization of ‘culture’ in intelligence studies, amongst scholars at first but subsequently practitioners as well, has taken on too powerful a role, one that has become too restrictive in its impact on thinking about other intelligence communities, especially non-Western ones. This restriction brings about unintentional cognitive closure that damages intelligence analysis. My argument leans heavily in many ways on the fine work of Desch in Security...
... Ivanov
, Director General
Andrei Kortunov
and Programme Director
Ivan Timofeev
.
As of 2014, the Foundation for Development and Support of the Valdai Discussion Club consists of the Russian International Affairs Council, the
Moscow State Institute of International Relations
, the
Council on Foreign and Defense Policy
and the
Higher School of Economics
. Over the course of three days, leading international affairs experts will discuss issues of global regulation, relations between Russia and the ...
... Club
, the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) – one of the club’s co-founders – has published a report by RIAC Programme Director Ivan Timofeev entitled “
World Order or World Anarchy: A Look at the Modern System of International Relations
.”
The situation in Ukraine and the crisis in international relations have again raised questions about what kind of world we live in. Is there such a thing as world order? What are its foundations? How should Russia proceed ...
Working Paper #XVIII / 2014
This working paper is an examination of the modern world order. Theoretical approaches to the analysis of international relations are revised and its guiding characteristics are determined.
The structure of the modern world order and its particular dynamics are revealed with the help of mathematical modelling methods. Possible directions for Russia’s policy ...
