Robert Nalbandov

Since its independence in 1991, Russia has struggled with the growing pains of defining its role in international politics. After Vladimir Putin ascended to power in 2000, the country undertook grandiose foreign policy projects in an attempt to delineate its place among the world’s superpowers. With this in mind, Robert Nalbandov examines the milestones of Russia’s international relations since the turn of the twenty-first century. He focuses on the specific goals, engagement practices, and tools used by Putin’s administration to promote Russia’s vital national and strategic interests in specific geographic locations. His findings illuminate Putin’s foreign policy objective of reinstituting Russian global strategic dominance. Nalbandov argues that identity-based politics have dominated Putin’s tenure and that Russia’s east/west split is reflected in Asian-European politics. Nalbandov’s analysis shows that unchecked domestic power, an almost exclusive application of hard power, and determined ambition for unabridged global influence and a defined place as a world superpower are the keys to Putin’s Russia.

Nations democratize at a different pace: Some achieve high governance standards, lasting political stability, and robust economies; others are lingering in their desires to look and act like their democratic counterparts. While no country strictly follows similar patterns of democratic institutionalization, there is a variable that defines the rate of success of their efforts: their political culture. The empirical study by Dr. Robert Nalbandov unveils this "democratization puzzle" of incongruence between the levels of democracy, internal peace, and economic prosperity between the newly independent states of Ukraine, Georgia, and Belarus. By investigating the political cultures of the three post-Soviet countries, Dr. Nalbandov concludes that it was the distinct political cultures of these states (flexible in Georgia, rigid in Belarus, and bifurcate in Ukraine) that produced diverse outcomes in each specific case.

This volume analyzes the successes and failures of foreign interventions in intrastate ethnic wars. Adding value to current research in the fields of international security and conflict resolution, it adopts the unique approach of considering successes of third party actions not by durable peace established in a target country (which is the more traditional approach) but by actual fulfilment of intervention goals and objectives, because multilateral interventions are more likely to achieve success in the pursuit of their goals than unilateral actions. Robert Nalbandov takes in-depth studies of interventions in Chad, Georgia, Somalia and Rwanda and relates them to the main theories of international security - the ethnic security dilemma and the credible commitment problem - to produce a fascinating and valuable volume.