Sylabus
1. Cold War Legacies and Gorbachev New Thinking
2. Key principles of Yeltsin’s Foreign Policy
3. Russian-American relations under Yeltsin
4. Russian-European relations under Yeltsin: Yugoslavian wars, EU, Central Europe
5. Russian policy of Near Abroad
6. Russian policy towards Asia and Middle East in Yeltsin times
7. Key principles of Foreign Policy in Putin/Medvedev era
8. Russian-American relations in Putin Era: from pragmatic cooperation to hostility
9. Russian-European (EU) relations in Putin Era
10. Russian-Chinese and Russian-Middle Eastern relations in Putin era
11. Russian Eurasian policy
12. Russian-Ukrainian conflict
13. Role of International organizations in Russian foreign policy strategies
Anotace
The course will discuss the development of Russian foreign policy from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the present, i.e. Russia’s foreign policy strategies under Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.
Attention will be paid to its transformation after the end of the Cold War, when Russia lost its status as one of the two superpowers and faced, at first, mainly American unilateral dominance in world politics and later the rise of other powers such as China, India and others. Russia had already faced these new challenges under Boris
Yeltsin, when it promoted a multilateral policy in opposition to US unilateralism, sought to strengthen its role in the world as a regional power, and built friendly and commercial relations with its partners, which increasingly included China, India, Iran and others. From the outset, Russia also sought to strengthen its dominant position in the former republics of the Soviet Union under the so-called Near Abroad policy and to strengthen its nuclear capability. Much attention will be paid to Russia’s foreign policy under Vladimir Putin, when efforts to balance efforts towards the West (especially the United States and the European Union) and East (China, India, Eurasian policy) have increasingly turned into a hostile stance towards the West, especially since Putin’s third presidential term in 2012. The events following the so-called Euromaidan, when Russia annexed Crimea and occupied parts of the eastern territories of Ukraine, were a landmark. However, the course will also look at other important relations, such as those towards the Middle East, Central Asia, the Far East, etc., in the form of case studies.
The course is divided into lecture and seminar part (1+1). Lectures will introduce main aspects and principles of
Russian foreign policy by the lecturer and open the space for seminar part, which include discussions over key documents and sources of Russian foreign policy supplemented by scholarly articles of experts in the field.
Students will be required to be acquainted in advance of each lecture/seminar with the pre-announced documents and sources (approximately 20-25 pages) and able to discuss them during seminar part of the course. Activity of students and their ability to discuss the questions during seminar part will consist 30 % of their final grade, while 70 % will consist final essay (2.000 words).