Putin’s Russia in the Making of a New International Order

With this white paper, the author has tried to develop an adequate understanding of Russia’s recent foreign policy shifts under the auspices of President Vladimir Putin and explains why these have been universally misunderstood within the international relations (IR) community at large. Its fundamental thesis is that the hegemonic status of realism in IR misconstrues Russia’s foreign policy actions as simply a manifestation of a narrow, ‘Hobbesian’ drive for state power within the international order. What is subsequently argued is that to fully grasp Russia’s actions requires an alternate IR framework – that of the English School, which approaches IR in ‘Grotian’ terms of norms for coexistence among states.