Understanding Putin: The politics of identity and geopolitics in Russian foreign policy discourse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the subsequent deterioration in its relations with the West have led many analysts to adopt a narrow view of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy motivations, chalking them up to old-school geopolitics. This paper makes the case that the traditional structural explanations for Russian foreign policy that are dominant within the discipline of international relations do not adequately consider the influence of identity in Putin’s emerging foreign policy narrative. Putin’s narrative is shaped by, and shapes, a discourse about cultural and historical ties with Russian borderlands, as well as by the cultural and security vulnerabilities generated by the West’s treatment of Russia, evidenced by the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This discourse has underscored a more militant foreign policy turn under Putin in which he is prepared to protect and defend Russia’s interests at high cost; Russia’s actions in Crimea exemplify this. This connection between identity and foreign policy in Putin’s Russia demands attention if we hope to gain a better grasp of Russian foreign policy under his leadership.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".