Russia's Foreign Policy from the Crimean Crisis to the Middle East: Great Power Gamble or Biopolitics?

The Crimea Crisis of 2014 and the subsequent conflict in Eastern Ukraine have
brought to the fore the troubled relations between Putin’s Russia and the West.
Observers have been oscillating between disbelief and alarm, trying to figure out
Russia’s conduct in foreign affairs by referring to imperialism, a new Cold War, or
to an inherently autocratic character of Russia to explain its foreign policy. The
2015 Russian intervention in Syria has further buttressed these interpretations. Instead,
this paper investigates Russia’s foreign policy along three key types of modern
power in political history: sovereignty, reason of state, and biopolitics. It highlights
how their respective instruments are fielded by Russia in four different cases: South
Ossetia (2008), the conflicts in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine (2014 and ongoing) as
well as and during the Syrian civil war (esp. since 2015). The aim of the paper is not
to explain the reasons underlying Russia’s foreign policy but rather to highlight its
formal mechanisms, which often resemble those of traditional great powers, including
sovereignty and reason of state. However, in the context of global governance,
biopolitics plays an increasingly important role for Russia.