The book explores the Russian leadership’s strategic agenda and illuminates the range of problems it faces in implementing it. Given these difficulties and the Russian leadership’s concerns about an unstable and increasingly competitive world, the Russian official and expert community often use the term ‘mobilisation’ to describe the measures that Moscow is increasingly resorting to in order to implement its agenda. The book explores what this means, and concludes that many of the terms used in the Western debate about Russia both misdiagnose the nature of the challenge and misrepresent the situation in Russia. At a time when many of the books about Russia are focused specifically on the war in Ukraine and the deterioration in relations between the Euro-Atlantic community and Russia, or are biographies of Vladimir Putin, it offers a new and unique lens through which to understand how Russia works and how Russian domestic and foreign politics are intimately linked.
Inhoudsopgave
Introduction: strategy in a time of crisis
1 Setting a strategic agenda
2 The problems of power in Russia
3 Making Russia work
4 Defending Russia
Conclusion: mobilising power in Russia
Over de auteur
Bill Jones is a Research Fellow in the Department of Government at the University of Manchester and is a former Director of Extra-Mural Studies at the University of Manchester