Russia in Global Affairs

The Soviet Union might have lost the first Cold War, but Russia is ahead in the rematch with the US and, this time, has every chance of coming out on top.

It is not yet clear what will replace the post-Cold War order in Europe. The major political and security institutions of this order – NATO, the EU, and the OSCE – remain, but their future roles and direction are unclear and in the process of redefinition, both from outside and from within.

The main objective of the next stage of international politics is to prevent any savage behaviour as rules and institutions crumble and it becomes every country for itself. This is hardly a very uplifting mission, but it is what the past thirty years amounted to.

The new set of global and regional actors can be taken for the new, multipolar hardware of the global system; its software is shaped by new structural realities, within which actors operate. These are conceptualized as the mismatch between material globalization and the decline of ideational universalism: the latter determines conflict while the former limits escalation. The article outlines the mode of competition within these structural realities, i.e., indirect coercion.