The Foreign Policy of Russia: Changing Systems, Enduring Interests, 2014

Now fully updated, this widely respected text traces the lineage and development of Russian foreign policy with the insight that comes from historical perspective. The fifth edition incorporates new and fully updated coverage of issues including relations with the major powers and with other post-communist states, international security issues including arms control issues and grounds for sanctions and intervention, and domestic and regional issues related to natural resource politics, human rights, Islamism and terrorism.perspective. Chronologically organized chapters highlight the continuities of Russias behavior in the world since tsarist times as well as the major sources of change and variability over the revolutionary period, wartime alliances and cold war, dtente, the Soviet collapse, and the first post-communist decades. The fifth edition incorporates new and fully updated coverage of issues including relations with the major powers and with other post-communist states, international security issues including arms control issues and grounds for sanctions and intervention, and domestic and regional issues related to natural resource politics, human rights, Islamism and terrorism. New coauthor Vidya Nadkarni strengthens the books coverage of issues related to Asia. The basic framework used in the book is a modified realism that stresses the balance of power and the importance of national interest, and identifies several factors (both internal and external) that condition Russian policy. The interpretations are original and based on a mix of primary and secondary sources.

Table of Contents:
Acronyms and Abbreviations; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 The Tsarist Roots of Russia’s Foreign Policy; Chapter 3 Soviet Foreign Policy; Chapter 4 Soviet Foreign Policy; Chapter 5 Domestic Factors in the Making of Russia’s Foreign Policy; Chapter 6 Russia and the States of the Former Soviet Union; Chapter 7 Yeltsin and the West; Chapter 8 Russia and the “Non-West”; Chapter 9 Russian Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World;

About the Author :
Robert H. Donaldson, educated at Harvard University, is Trustees Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Tulsa. Past president of both the University of Tulsa and Fairleigh Dickinson University, he also has taught and held administrative positions at Lehman College of the City University of New York and Vanderbilt University. He has served at the U.S. Department of State as International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, and at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College as visiting research professor. Professor Donaldson has written extensively on Soviet and Russian politics and foreign policy and has authored or coauthored five other books. Joseph L. Nogee, professor emeritus at the University of Houston, was educated at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, the University of Chicago, and Yale University. Professor Nogee also has taught at Vanderbilt University, New York University, the University of Virginia, Rice University, and the U.S. Army War College. His teaching and research areas are international politics and Soviet and Russian politics. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of eight books, including Russian Politics: The Struggle for a New Order (1996). Vidya Nadkarni, Professor of Political Science at the University of San Diego, has taught there since 1990. She was educated at St. Xavier’s College, University of Bombay, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and the University of British Columbia. Dr. Nadkarni teaches courses in the area of international relations and foreign policy, and her research interests center on the foreign policies of resurgent (Russia) and aspiring (China, India) global powers. She is author of Strategic Partnerships in Asia: Balancing without Alliances (2010) and co-editor of Emerging Powers in a Comparative Perspective: The Political and Economic Rise of the BRIC Countries (2012).

Review :
"This new edition is vital in understanding Russia's foreign policy actions." --J. R. Clardie, Cameron University Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers, upper-division undergraduate students, and graduate students.CHOICE