Russia's escalating opposition to popular revolutions in the Post-Soviet region and Middle East: A quest for domestic legitimacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis attempts to explain the sources of Russia’s opposition to popular uprisings in the post-Soviet region and Middle East since the colour revolutions in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004). Although Russia has experienced few major episodes of unrest in recent years, Moscow’s opposition to popular uprisings has escalated from rhetorical criticisms of the colour revolutions to its military interventions in Ukraine and Syria. This thesis argues that existing neoclassical realist, English School and constructivist arguments incompletely explain this phenomenon, and instead advances a novel theoretical approach called “instrumental constructivism.” This theory contends that Russia’s counter-revolutionary policy is an integral component of its foreign policy identity that crystallised in an incremental fashion. Soviet and transition-era framings of popular unrest conditioned the Russian public to associate mass protests with rampant disorder, and Western interference and expansionism. As Vladimir Putin’s presidency progressed, the Russian public also linked successful challenges to the Western-dominated liberal order to domestic perceptions of great power status. In order to align Russian foreign policy more closely with public opinion, Russian officials constructed a counter-revolutionary foreign policy identity, which exploited popular insecurities about mass protests and appealed to domestic status aspirations. To provide empirical evidence for instrumental constructivism’s key contentions, this thesis explores Russia’s responses to the colour revolutions and Arab Spring and uses Ukraine after the Euro-Maidan revolution and the Syrian civil war as its two primary case studies. The thesis concludes by assessing instrumental constructivism’s potential transferability to the foreign policy conduct of other authoritarian states, and to related dimensions of Russia’s global offensive against liberal democracy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".