Book Review Roundtable: Alexander Cooley’s Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia

In this book review roundtable, seven experts discuss Alexander Cooley’s Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia, followed by a response essay from the author

Writing Russia's future: paradigms, drivers, and scenarios

The development of prediction and forecasting in the social sciences over the past century and more is closely linked with developments in Russia. The Soviet collapse undermined confidence in predictive capabilities, and scenario planning emerged as the dominant future-oriented methodology in area studies, including the study of Russia. Scenarists anticipate multiple futures rather than predicting one. The approach is too rarely critiqued. Building on an account of Russia-related forecasting in the twentieth century, analysis of two decades of scenarios reveals uniform accounts which downplay the insights of experts and of social science theory alike

Comparing political futures: the rise and use of scenarios in future-oriented area studies

The predictive ability of scholars of politics has long been a subject of theoretical debate and methodological development. In theoretical debate, prediction represents a central issue regarding the extent to which the study of politics is scientific. In methodological development, much effort and resource have been devoted to a diverse range of predictive approaches, with varying degrees of success. Expectations that scholars forecast accurately come as much from the policy and media worlds as from the academy. Since the end of the Cold War, scenario development has become prevalent in future-oriented research by area studies scholars. This approach is long due critical re-assessment. For all its strengths as a policy tool, scenario development tends towards a bounded methodology, driving the process of anticipating futures along predetermined paths into a standardised range of options, and paying insufficient attention to theoretical and contextual understandings available within the relevant scholarly disciplines

Between the democratisation of international relations and status quo politics : Russia's foreign policy towards the Iranian nuclear programme

This article sheds light on Russia’s foreign policy towards the Iranian nuclear programme and analyses to what extent Russia’s Iran policies are indicative of a security culture that resists hegemony. Following a two-level model between a discursive and a behavioral level of foreign policy, it will be shown how Moscow advocates a non-hegemonic security culture discursively, but still displays a level of behavioural convergence with hegemonic power structures. Process-tracing Russia’s positioning on the Iranian nuclear dossier as from the disclosure of Iran’s nuclear programme in 2002, the article carves out Russian normative conceptions in international relations and material considerations that let Russia partially fall short of acting upon its own discourse. It will be argued that Russian Iran policy is the outcome of a balancing act between resistance to hegemony and hegemonic accommodation