Russia abroad : driving regional fracture in post-Communist Eurasia and beyond /
Anna Ohanyan, editor.
- Washington, DC : Georgetown University Press, (c)2018.
- 1 online resource
Includes bibliographies and index.
Theory of regional fracture -- Theory of regional fracture in international relations / From Donbass to Damascus : Russia on the move / Lenin's revenge : regional fracture in the post-Soviet space -- Fractured Eurasian borderlands : the case of Ukraine / The South Caucasus : fracture without end? / Small states and the large costs of regional fracture : the case of Armenia / Central Asia : fractured region, illiberal regionalism / Post-colonial roots of regional fracture beyond the former Soviet Union -- Stuck in between : the Western Balkans as a fractured region / Syria and the Middle East : fracture meets fracture / Conclusion : overcoming regional fracture / Anna Ohanyan -- Robert Nalbandov -- Vsevolod Samokhvalov -- Laurence Broers -- Richard Giragosian -- David Lewis -- Dimitar Bechev -- Mark Katz -- Anna Ohanyan.
While we know a great deal about the benefits of regional integration, there is a knowledge gap when it comes to areas with weak or nonexistent regional fabric in political and economic life. Furthermore, deliberate "un-regioning", applied by actors external as well as internal to a region has also gone unnoticed, despite its increasingly sophisticated modern application by Russia in its peripheries. This volume helps us understand what Anna Ohanyan calls fractured regions and their consequences for contemporary global security. Ohanyan introduces a theory of regional fracture to explain how and why regions come apart, stay isolated, and foster weak states. This volume specifically examines how Russia employs regional fracture as a strategy to keep states on its periphery in Eurasia and the Middle East weak and in Russia's orbit. Some fractured regions become global security threats because weak states are more likely to be hubs of transnational crime, havens for militants, or sites of conflict. The regional fracture theory is offered as a fresh perspective about the post-American world and a way to broaden international relations scholarship on comparative regionalism.