| 来源类型 | Research Reports |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| Thinking foreign policy in Russia: Think tanks and grand narratives | |
| Anton Barbashin; Alexander Graef | |
| 发表日期 | 2019-11-12 |
| 出版年 | 2019 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 概述 | Russia’s post-Crimean foreign policy does not exist in a vacuum. Its ramifications are colliding with regional and global trends that are effectively destabilizing the post-Cold War international order. |
| 摘要 | Over the course of the last decade Russian foreign policy has taken critical turns, surprising not only the entire international community but also Russia’s own foreign policy experts. Arguably, the most notable turn came in March 2014 when Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, setting in motion developments that are continuously shaping Russia, its neighbors, and, to a certain degree, global affairs. Clearly, Russia’s post-Crimean foreign policy does not exist in a vacuum. Its ramifications are colliding with regional and global trends that are effectively destabilizing the post-Cold War international order, creating uncertainties that are defining the contemporary international moment. $In this report, we deal with those whose job it is to explain the logic of Russia’s foreign policy turns and to analyze global trends and their meaning for Russia and the rest of the world. Although these experts, as a rule, do not directly influence political decision-making, their debates, as Graeme Herd argues, “set the parameters for foreign policy choices” and “shape elite and public perceptions of the international environment” in Russia.1Graeme Herd, “Security Strategy: Sovereign Democracy and Great Power Aspirations,” in The Politics of Security in Modern Russia, ed. Mark Galeotti (Surrey, England, Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub. Co, 2010), 16. Especially in times of crisis and rapid change ideas produced at some earlier stage by experts and think tanks external to the state bureaucracy can suddenly obtain instrumental value and direct policy options. $In Part 1, we briefly discuss the role of think tanks in Russian foreign policymaking and present the landscape of Russian think tanks working on foreign policy issues. We distinguish among three basic institutional forms: academic and university-based think tanks, private think tanks, and state-sponsored think tanks. Highlighting the diversity of organizations, we then focus on four state-sponsored think tanks whose size, political contacts, and financial means allow them to dominate the think tank scene in Russia and that represent different ideological angles of a broad, yet also comparatively volatile mainstream: the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (SVOP), the Valdai Discussion Club, the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), and the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISI). $Part 2 follows this selection by looking at Russian
foreign policy debates since 2014. We consider how experts writing for these
four organizations have approached three major themes: the evolution of the
concept of Greater Europe and European Union (EU)-Russia relations, the
establishment of the Greater Eurasia narrative in the context of Russia’s
declared pivot to the East, and the concepts of multipolarity and the liberal
world order. $Return to table of contents$Any discussion of the role of think tanks in Russia needs to start with the fact that Russian foreign policymaking is highly centralized. According to the 1993 Constitution, the Russian president directs the state’s foreign policy.2Constitution of the Russian Federation, art. 86. Yet in the 1990s, the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, which had been dominated by the Communist Party in opposition to President Boris Yeltsin, at times exerted considerable influence on the course of events, for example by refusing to ratify international treaties or by developing independent policy proposals. In turn, Russia’s foreign policy goals had not yet been fixed and strategies remained subject to frequent changes and compromise.$Since the first election of Vladimir Putin to the presidency
in March 2000, the policy process has been increasingly concentrated within the
presidential administration, where Putin himself acts as the sole strategic
decision maker. Starting in 2003, liberal oppositional parties were
increasingly pushed out of the State Duma, and the new party of power, United
Russia, received a constitutional majority. The remaining opposition parties,
including the once highly critical Communists, were increasingly co-opted in
support of presidential policies.$In consequence, today, direct personal access to
members of the administration and/or the president is the only way to have any
real influence on the course of political action. This dominance of the state
bureaucracy and its insulation from societal forces shapes the environment for
the development and activities of (foreign policy) think tanks, in a
considerable departure from Western liberal democracies, where the think tank concept
was first developed.$In the United States, think tanks have been traditionally understood as “nonprofit organizations” with “substantial organizational independence” and the aim to influence public policy making.3R. Kent Weaver, “The Changing World of Think Tanks.” PS: Political Science & Politics 22, no. 3 (1989): 563–78. In a path-breaking article thirty years ago, R. Kent Weaver suggested that such organizations come in three ideal-typical forms: “universities without students,” “contract research organizations,” and “advocacy think tanks.” His classification rests on the differences in staff, operational principles, and product lines. While “universities without students” and “contract research organizations” both value academic credentials and norms of objectivity, they produce different types of work: monographs and articles versus problem-focused analyses commissioned by state agencies. “Advocacy think tanks,” by contrast, recruit staff with various backgrounds, including from business, journalism, and the military, and often “put a distinctive spin on existing research” with the deliberate aim to influence policy making and public debate.4Ibid, 567. $This tripartite concept helps us make sense of different strategies within the marketplace of ideas, but the assumption of organizational independence from the state does not travel well beyond the Anglo-American tradition.5Diane Stone and Mark Garnett, “Introduction: think tanks, policy advice and governance” in Think tanks across nations: A comparative approach, ed. Diane Stone, Andrew Denham and Mark Garnett (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 3. In continental Europe, think tanks, particularly those working on foreign policy issues, are often linked to state institutions and/or political parties. At the same time, they are actively engaged in policy development and enjoy considerable intellectual autonomy. By the same token, the notion of think tanks as exclusively nonprofits unnecessarily excludes organizations that exist as businesses but engage in public policy debates. This is problematic because, in some countries, including Russia, choosing enterprises instead of non-profit organizations as the legal form of choice for think tanks is simply a way to avoid increasing state control of politically active civil society and noncommercial activities. $Hence, rather than starting from a narrow definition of think tanks as a specific type of organization, we follow recent arguments that think tanks should be seen as “platforms, composed of many individuals who have multiple affiliations and multiple ideas.”6David Cadier and Monika Sus, “Think Tank Involvement in Foreign Policymaking in the Czech Republic and Poland,” International Spectator 52, no. 1 (2017): 119. $They often function as meeting places for key stakeholders to produce specific end-products, such as publications or events. As will become clear, such a flexible approach is especially helpful in Russia, where organizational boundaries can be fuzzy and where experts frequently collaborate and can belong to multiple think tanks. More important than establishing clear-cut boundaries is to investigate their historical trajectory, which includes different sets of practices and various forms of policy work.$$Different think tanks then can be usefully placed within a typological table along two dimensions: on the one hand, the kind and mixture of policy-related work following Weaver’s classification, differentiating among academic research, contract-based policy analyses, and advocacy; on the other hand, the degree of organizational autonomy, which includes institutional independence from both state agencies and private sponsors. The combination of both dimensions provides us with an admittedly rough, but helpful overview of the relative social position of thirteen selected Russian think tanks within the marketplace of producing policy ideas (Table 1). $Our selection combines size, capacity, and institutional variety to illustrate the existence of different think tanks forms in Russia.7A dataset compiled by the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC 2015) presents ninety-four “organizations” active in the field of international research. However, the data collection among others includes eighteen institutions of the Russian Academy of Sciences, thirty university faculties, seven publications, three foreign organizations (including the Carnegie Moscow Center), and two polling firms. Moreover, since 2015 several centers listed in the directory have been dissolved or are inactive, while others focus dominantly on socio-economic policy issues. Hence, the actual number of Russian institutions in the field of foreign policy that could be categorized as think tanks broadly understood is considerably smaller and if one includes all area studies institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) and certain universities closer to thirty. See http://ir.russiancouncil.ru/ir/. At the same time, the experts and think tanks discussed here do represent the dominant mainstream of the Russian foreign policy expert community with relevance for both policy and public debate. Think tanks beyond this selection usually (still) lack political relevance and critical mass,8For example, the Center for Strategic Assessment and Forecasts established by Sergey Grinyaev in February 2012 and the public diplomacy NGO Creative Diplomacy (PICREADI) founded in 2010 by Natalia Burlinova. study foreign policy only in passing,9For example, the Gorbachev Foundation, the Center for Political Technologies (founded in 1991 by Igor Bunin), the Institute of Political Studies (established in 1996 by Sergey Markov) and the Sulashkin Center (established by former Duma deputy Stepan Sulashkin in 2013). or focus on concrete world regions with a dominant domestic policy perspective.10 This includes, for example, the Institute of the Middle East established as the Institute of Israel in 1993 by Yevgeny Satanovsky. Moreover, the area studies institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), i.e. the Institute of Europe, the Institute of Oriental Studies and the Institute for African Studies, cover an entire range of issues from language, to history and politics. A special case are those centers that work among others on the post-Soviet space and specifically Ukraine, enjoying close personal relations with political power such as the Institute of CIS countries founded in 1996 by SVOP member and Duma deputy Konstantin Zatulin and the Center for Current Policy, established in 1992 and currently led by former deputy head of internal policy at the Presidential Administration, Alexey Chesnakov who is close to Presidential aide Vladislav Surkov. Finally, some think tanks that have been active in the past have either been shut down or reduced their activities to a minimum.11For example, the Institute for Political and Military Analysis (Alexander Sharavin and Alexander Khramchikhin; reduced activities), the Center for Strategic Assessments (Sergey Oznobishchev and Alexey Konovalov; inactive), the Institute of Strategic Studies and Analysis (Vagif Guseynov; dissolved after 2014) and the monarchist-orthodox ‘analytical center’ Katekhon, which ceased its public activities in Spring 2017. In this context it is important to emphasize that most Russian (foreign policy) think tanks are very small and depend on the leadership and engagement of just one or two persons. Hence, think tanks are usually heavily interrelated on an interpersonal level with individual analysts working simultaneously for several institutions. Because foreign policy is not a professionally clear-cut field of knowledge production, there are also overlaps with institutions dealing dominantly with economic and military policy issues.12In the field of military analysis there exists many different networks and clubs led by former officers, including for example the Academy of Military Sciences (Makhmut Gareev), the Academy of Geopolitical Problems (Leonid Ivashov), the Club of Military Leaders (Anatoly Kulikov) and the Association of Military Political Scientists (Vasily Belozyorov). With the exception of the Academy of Military Science most of them, however, do not issue policy analyses or (academic) research products on any significant scale. $The following two parts describe the emergence and main attributes of these thirteen think tanks, which are denoted by their official acronyms. First, we provide an overview of the general landscape of Russian foreign policy think tanks, which we divide into three groups: academic and university-based think tanks, private think tanks, and state-sponsored think tanks. Second, within the last group we zoom in on four organizations (in gray) that have played a significant role in Russian foreign policy debates in the last decade yet simultaneously represent different ideological angles. The more detailed information about their institutional design and historical trajectory will help us understand the social context of the policy debates that will be at the center of Part 2.$Return to table of contents$$Russian think tanks working on foreign policy issues can be divided into three basic groups depending on type of ownership and how they evolved historically. First, there are academic state-funded institutions, which include research institutes within the system of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) and state universities with faculties focused on studying foreign policy and international relations. Second, the collapse of the Soviet Union enabled not only former scholars but also journalists and military officers to establish their own private think tanks, particularly in the 1990s. Although many folded over time, some are still operating in distinct niches despite increasing political pressure. Finally, since the late 2000s the Russian state, with its growing political ambitions and economic potential, has actively invested in the creation of (foreign policy) think tanks and intellectual platforms. Nevertheless, as we will argue, the source of this support has been neither monolithic nor unambiguous. Rather, state-sponsored think tanks represent, to some extent, different positions and power struggles within the political elite.$Given this institutional diversity, Russian think tanks exist in numerous legal forms. Apart from those organizations which are part of state universities or exist as “state budget scientific institutions,” most (foreign policy) think tanks come in the form of either (autonomous) non-commercial organizations (NCO) or enterprises. Whereas the latter provides more liberty of action, the former is more common, even among state-sponsored think tanks, despite increasing regulation. In contrast to the United States, where think tanks as non-profit organizations and their donors enjoy significant tax advantages, the Russian tax law knows such privileges only for socially oriented NCOs, but on a lower scale.13Some NCOs, such as non-commercial partnerships, are allowed to engage in business activities. A heavy blow for think tanks existing as NCOs has been the revision of the Russian NCO law from July 2012, introducing the status of “foreign agents” for those NCOs that in some form touch upon political issues in their work and receive foreign funding.14Federal law “On non-commercial organizations,” Art. 2 (6), see http://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_LAW_8824/87a16eb8a9431fff64d0d78eb84f86accc003448/ Currently there are seventy-five such organizations, which are subject to intensified bureaucratic control and often public harassment. Moreover, since May 2015, the law on undesirable organizations has terminated the activities of several foreign donor organizations of Russian politically active NCOs, including the Open Society Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, and the MacArthur Foundation.15The current list of undesirable organization whose activities are banned includes fifteen institutions, see https://minjust.ru/ru/activity/nko/unwanted. The MacArthur Foundation decided to leave Russia after the law had been adopted, see https://www.macfound.org/press/press-releases/statement-macarthur-president-julia-stasch-foundations-russia-office/. $$Most institutions doing academic research on foreign affairs and international relations in Russia are part of the Academy of Sciences and represent area studies institutes, which were predominantly founded in the late 1950s and 1960s to support Soviet international engagement. Given the lack of professional experience with many world regions inside the state bureaucracy at the time, these institutes became centers of nonmilitary knowledge production on the culture, politics, and economies of various countries, including the United States.16In addition, there are the Institute for African Studies (1959), the Institute for Latin America (1961), the Institute of the Far East (1966), and the Institute of Europe (1987). Together with the Economic Research Institute (1976) and the Institute of History, Archaeology, and Ethnography of the Peoples of the Far-East (1971), which both belong to the Far Eastern Branch of the RAS, since 2010 they constitute the department on global problems and international relations. In Soviet times, the two best-known were the Institute for US and Canadian Studies (ISKAN, today known as ISKRAN) founded in 1967 and the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO) that had been re-established in 1956.17IMEMO became the successor to the Institute for World Economy and World Politics, which had been established in 1925. In 1947, however, it was abolished after the ideas of its long-term director, Eugene Varga, about the postwar posture of the Soviet Union came into conflict with Stalin’s policies. Both profited from the Western focus of Soviet foreign policy, large research staffs, and their directors’ political connections.18For example, after Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, he appointed his friend, long-term ambassador to Canada and former IMEMO Director Alexander Yakovlev, to secretary of the Central Committee in charge of ideology. Yakovlev’s successor at IMEMO, Yevgeny Primakov, joined Soviet politics in 1989 as the chairman of the Soviet of the Union, the lower house of the Soviet parliament. The time of perestroika and glasnost was the heyday for these Soviet think tanks’ involvement in politics. Several initiatives by the political leadership were rooted in ideas developed at IMEMO and ISKAN or had been directly suggested by them. For the political role played by these institutes and their experts in the Soviet Union, see Jeffrey T. Checkel, Ideas and International Political Change: Soviet/Russian Behavior and the End of the Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) and Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). $With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the institutionalized system of policy advisory based on the Communist Party structure dissolved. The fully state-financed institutes lost much of their funding and given the economic crisis, state interest in foreign and security policy issues diminished. In addition, many scholars, particularly young ones, got better-paid jobs in business or left the country altogether.19For example, in 1986, IMEMO had more than 700 researchers and almost 1,000 employees. With currently about 350 employees, it is again at the level of the late 1950s but remains by far the largest institute within the RAS department on global problems and international relations. See Pyotr Cherkasov, ИМЭМО Очерк истории (Moscow: Весь Мир, 2016), 428, 741. In consequence, the average age of Russian scholars steadily increased, whereas Western approaches–particularly International Relations (IR) theory—which had not officially existed as a subject in the Soviet Union—had to be learned anew. Only in the mid-2000s did some of the institutes and Russian academia in general partially recover from financial and institutional decay.20In the context of the RAS reform from 2013 to 2018 the maximum age for directors of state research organizations was set at 70. See “Федеральный закон от 22 декабря 2014 г. N 443 Ф3,” https://rg.ru/2014/12/26/fz443.dok.html. The different institutes, however, have had vastly different levels of success, depending on their leadership. For example, while IMEMO under the directorship of Alexander Dynkin (2006-2016), who now acts as the institute’s President and head of academic research, has secured new private funds, attracted young scholars, and once again become an international household name, not least through events such as the annual Primakov Readings, the once-prominent ISKAN (ISKRAN) has faced financial difficulties and overall decline. In July 2015, IMEMO was named after its former director and late Russian prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, who had passed the month before.21“ИМЭМО РАН ходатайствовал о присвоении институту имени Примакова,” Interfax, July 3, 2015, https://www.interfax.ru/russia/451424. $Traditionally, the Soviet model envisaged a split between research done at the RAS institutes and teaching as the exclusive responsibility of universities. After 1991, this division of tasks started to break down, and Russian universities increasingly moved into applied research on foreign policy and international affairs. Today, the dominant university remains the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), which is directly subordinate to the Russian Foreign Ministry. Together with the Diplomatic Academy, it is responsible for the education of most Russian diplomats.$However, as the think tank of the Foreign Ministry, MGIMO is also deeply involved in applied policy work and produces research notes and reports for government agencies. In 1976, the Institute established the Problem Research Laboratory for System Analysis, which eventually became one of just two Soviet centers studying IR theory.22Mark Khrustalyov, “Две ветви ТМО в России,” Международные процессы 4, ном. 2 (2006), 119-128, http://intertrends.ru/system/Doc/ArticlePdf/1058/PERSONA-GRATA-11.pdf After several reforms, in 2009 the lab became the Institute for International Studies (IMI), which consists of ten research centers that loosely cooperate. Together, they are responsible for executing the annual Russian Ministry of Forign Affairs (MFA) policy research agenda and answering ad-hoc inquires of the Ministry. Since October 2018, IMI has been headed by the young US specialist Andrey Sushentsov, who is also program director at Valdai and in 2014 founded his own small analytical agency (“Foreign Policy”).23Analysts writing for the agency are predominantly based in Russian universities, particularly MGIMO. The agency is available at http://www.foreignpolicy.ru/. Since 2017, Sushentsov has been the president of another MGIMO in-house analytical center called “Eurasian Strategies” with largely the same people involved, see http://eurasian-strategies.com/about-us/leadership/. $Moreover, in the post-Soviet era, the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow has become a hub for modern social science research. In 2006, it established a faculty on the global economy and international affairs under the leadership of then-SVOP Chairman Sergey Karaganov. While the faculty and the entire university could be legitimately seen as think tanks in their own right, Karaganov established the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies (CCEIS) in October 2006 as a specialized center with seven initial employees, including his associates Timofey Bordachev and Dmitry Suslov, who at first became managing director and deputy managing director, respectively.24Bordachev is now scientific supervisor (as is Karaganov), whereas Suslov remains deputy academic director. Director Anastasia Likhacheva has led CCEIS since spring 2019.$From the start, CCEIS had been envisaged as the leading policy research center of the faculty, providing commissioned reports to Russian enterprises and different economic-related state institutions with a focus on EU-Russian relations and the institutional development of the EU. Over time, it widened its research activities and increasingly started to promote the study of Eurasia, the Far East, and international cooperation within the framework of the association of five major emerging national economies known as the “BRICS.” Although applied research on the EU continued, the focus after the Russian-Georgian war in 2008 shifted to a more critical and confrontational attitude toward EU-Russia cooperation. This shift eventually resulted in the development of the “Greater Eurasia” paradigm as an alternative to both “Wider Europe” promoted by the EU and “Greater Europe,” the preferred concept of the Russian leadership in the early 2000s.$$The collapse of the Soviet Union enabled private think tank initiatives for the first time. Several former academics from the RAS institutes and state universities established their own small policy research centers and networks. Given the lack of domestic funding, almost all had to rely on Western sponsorship. Many remained one-person operations and were soon dissolved. On the other hand, the economic crisis in Russia during the 1990s did not particularly encourage research on foreign and security policy beyond nuclear nonproliferation and arms control. State demand existed, if at all, for economic and financial policy issues. Nevertheless, during this time several successful private initiatives evolved as enterprises or noncommercial organizations. Since 2012, the noncommercial groups have faced considerable challenges due to changing legislation—particularly the foreign agents law from June 2012 and the law on undesirable organizations from May 2015—that made it more difficult to attract sponsorship from abroad.$Two successful private think tanks are the Center for Political Research in Russia (PIR) and the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST). The first was established by journalist Vladimir Orlov and some friends in spring 1994 at the newspaper Moskovskie Novosti (Moscow News), which had been the mouthpiece of Soviet perestroika. They set up the journal Yaderny Kontrol (Nuclear Control)25In 2007 the journal was renamed Indeks bezopasnosti (Security Index). The journal ceased to exist in 2016, See also Vladimir Orlov, “Brave New PIR: Turning the 20-year Journey into Generation 2.0,” Security Index 20, no. 3-4 (2014), https://doi.org/10.1080/19934270.2014.986364. in both English and Russian and soon received funding from the MacArthur Foundation and political-institutional support from MGIMO Rector Anatoly Torkunov and Yeltsin’s National Security Aide Yuri Baturin. Subsequent increases in funding enabled PIR to expand its work to new areas. Moving away from the narrow focus on nuclear nonproliferation, it launched projects on chemical weapons, missile technology, nonproliferation, military and technical cooperation, and civilian control of military activities. PIR, thus, transformed into what Orlov terms a “boutique think tank”26Ibid., 5. and became a hub for ambitious young students and researchers.$CAST was founded in 1997 by two former PIR employees, Ruslan Pukhov and Konstantin Makienko, who took with them the bulletin on conventional arms they had produced for PIR. In c |
| 主题 | Civil Society ; International Norms ; Politics & Diplomacy ; Russia |
| URL | https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/thinking-foreign-policy-in-russia-think-tanks-and-grand-narratives/ |
| 来源智库 | Atlantic Council (United States) |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/345806 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Anton Barbashin,Alexander Graef. Thinking foreign policy in Russia: Think tanks and grand narratives. 2019. |
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