Russia's Security Policy under Putin

A critical perspective

Aglaya Snetkov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136759758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

This book examines the evolution of Russia's security policy under Putin in the 21st century, using a critical security studies approach.

Drawing on critical approaches to security the book investigates the interrelationship between the internal-external nexus and the politics of (in)security and regime-building in Putin's Russia. In so doing, it evaluates the way that this evolving relationship between state identities and security discourses framed the construction of individual security policies, and how, in turn, individual issues can impact on the meta-discourses of state and security agendas. To this end, the (de)securitisation discourses and practices towards the issue of Chechnya are examined as a case study.

In so doing, this study has wider implications for how we read Russia as a security actor through an approach that emphasises the importance of taking into account its security culture, the interconnection between internal/external security priorities and the dramatic changes that have taken place in Russia's conceptions of itself, national and security priorities and conceptualisation of key security issues, in this case Chechnya. These aspects of Russia's security agenda remain somewhat of a neglected area of research, but, as argued in this book, offer structuring and framing implications for how we understand Russia's position towards security issues, and perhaps those of rising powers more broadly.

This book will be of much interest to students of Russian security, critical security studies and IR.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203559390-1

Although losing its superpower status with the end of the Cold War, Russia continues to be seen as a central player within international security. In recent years, for example, it has played a high-profile role in a number of pertinent security events, crises and developments. These include making use of its status as a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council to, alongside China, veto a number of UN resolutions on the Syrian civil war, the signing of the ‘new’ START agreement on nuclear arms reductions with the US in 2010, an armed conflict with Georgia over the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008, and most recently its role and actions during the 2014 Ukraine crisis, which saw the annexation of Crimea, and have led to the re-emergence of high-level tensions in its relationship with Europe and NATO.

In light of its continued, and often somewhat unpredictable and antagonistic, role within international security, understanding Russia as a security actor continues to attract attention. Indeed, the increasingly conscious effort by the Putin-led regime to take a more assertive line in its foreign security policy, and to reassert its ‘great power status’ in general, has been followed closely by both Russia-watchers and those interested in international security writ large (Mankoff 2012; Kanet 2011). In parallel, the internal political situation in Russia has also been a source of interest to the some of the same audiences, who have sought to understand the rise of the Putin regime, its political project and the extent of its control over all aspects of Russian life. In this way, the nature, and future trajectory, of Russia as both a domestic polity and a foreign policy actor remains a pertinent question for scholars, analysts and policymakers alike.

However, due to the divisions between academic disciplines, these two realms of interest – Russian foreign security policy and Russian domestic politics – have largely been treated separately from one another, creating an artificial divide between two facets of what this book sees as connected whole. The consideration of domestic and foreign policy as independent from one another is a trend that is noticeable – and increasingly recognized as problematic – with regard to scholarship on and the analysis of many state actors within the international system. It, however, seems particularly self-limiting for understanding and interpreting Putin’s Russia, in which the interconnections between the regime’s state-building project and both its domestic and foreign security policy have been publically asserted within official discourse, from the regime’s first day in office through to its reactions to the mass-protests against the return of Putin to the Presidency in 2012.

Making Russia strong again – both domestically and internationally – was and, to a large extent, remains the stated prime objective of the Putin regime. The regime’s efforts to this end have encompassed a domestic state-building project, efforts to both consolidate and expand the regime’s power domestically, and regain the prestige of a ‘great power’ within the international system. And, as the Putin regime’s policies, perceptions and reactions have evolved since 2000, there have been various shifts in its state-building macro-discourse, which, in turn, has both shaped, and been shaped by, changes in the self-identification and prioritizations of Russia as a security actor.

Taking this into account, this book sets out to investigate and account for the evolution of Russia’s security policy since 2000, under the presidency of both Putin and Medvedev. It seeks to shed light on this subject by dispensing with the artificial separation of domestic and foreign policy. This study, rather, focuses on tracing the mutually-constituted relationship between Russian state identity and security discourses – both foreign and domestic – since Putin came to power. Not only does this study avoid the pitfalls of ‘black boxing’ the domestic from the foreign, and vice versa, by considering security policy in relation to the regime’s wider state building political project, it also analyses domestic and foreign security policy as a coherent and interdependent whole around the internal-external security nexus.

To examine the mutually-constituted interrelationship between state identity and security prioritization discourses in Putin’s Russia, this study traces its impact on a single security policy: Chechnya. And how, in turn, this single policy issue impacted on these macro-level discourses. By analysing this particular single-policy, this study aims to gain insight not only into this specific policy issue, but also how the interrelationship between state identity and security discourses impacted on, and was impacted by, the evolution of individual policy decisions and discourse. In this way, the ebbs and flows of Russia’s discourses and policies towards Chechnya can be seen as illustrative of concurrent shifts in Russia’s national state identity and security discourses and priorities.

On coming to power, the Putin regime depicted Chechnya as a major threat to the fundamentals of the modern Russia nation-state – its territorial integrity and national sovereignty, with the regime making direct connections between the ‘Chechnya issue’ and wider state identity and their political project to rebuild Russia from a ‘weak’ to a ‘strong’ state. Whilst no longer considered a pre-eminent security concern by the Putin regime, a strong emphasis on the wider regional instability and terrorism in the North Caucasus, of which Chechnya is an important part, remains evident in both state and security discourses. Taking this into account, this book seeks to explain how Chechnya’s symbolic importance within Russian state identity and security discourses altered from representing an existential threat in the early 2000s to being held up as an example of a wider trend of successful state-building by the end of the decade. In other words, it seeks to account for how the image of Chechnya changed from that of a state-breaker to state-maker in official Russian discourse under Putin and Medvedev.

Furthermore, this study’s longitudinal approach will enable the changes and continuity within the nature of Russia as security actor since 2000 to be assessed. It will trace the interrelationships between all these discourses – state identity, internal security, external security and single policy issue – across this period. And thus provide a contextualized account of how they came together to shape Russia as a security actor at a particular time, and hence how changes in these discourses influenced one another, and ultimately impacted on Russian security policy. Therefore, rather than presenting Russia or the Putin regime as a more or less fixed entity as is often the case, this longitudinal approach reveals that the nature of Russia as a security actor has evolved in a much more dynamic manner than is usually suggested.

Moving beyond the exernal-internal divide in analysing Russian security policy

There is an extensive body of literature on the directions, interests and priorities of Russian security policy under both Putin and Medvedev. Most of these studies are situated within the International Relations (IR) literature, and apply theories and concepts from this field to an empirical examination of Russian foreign and security policy. Such studies have focused on Russia’s relations with the West in general (de Haas 2010; Kanet 2005), and its external relations with the US, NATO or the EU in particular (Hallenberg and Karlsson 2006; Trenin et al. 2008; Averre 2005; Kaveshnikov 2010; Pouliot 2010). Others are based on Russia’s approach and role with regard to particular international security issue areas, such as the proliferation and reduction of nuclear weapons (den Dekker 2010; Cimbala 2009; Shoumikhin 2002), the international arms trade and arms control agreements (Lahille 2008), weapons of mass destruction (Tsypkin 2009) or energy security (Dellecker and Gomart 2011; Wood 2009; Hadfield 2008; Proedrou 2007). In response to Russia’s renewed interest in what it considers as its region, a number of works have examined Russia’s external relations with other post-Soviet states in general (Freire and Kanet 2012; Pirchner 2005), and more specifically with regard to Central Asia (Paramonov, Strokov and Stolpovski 2009), the increasingly problematic relations with its Western neighbours of Ukraine and Belarus (Nygren 2005), and growing tensions with states in the South Caucasus, and Georgia in particular (Nygren 2007a). Within this body of works, there is an implicit assumption that Russian security policy is largely the product of the external, or the international, rather than the internal, or Russia’s domestic, context.

While fewer in numbers, a series of studies on Russia’s internal security context have appeared in recent years. These cover a wider-range of topics, including the nature and dynamics of the Russian military and its reform (Vendil 2009; de Haas 2004), the power and the influence of the siloviki in Russia (Renz 2006; Soldatov and Borogan 2010; Taylor 2007), the politics of security (Galeotti 2010) and questions of food and environmental security (Sedik et al. 2003; Funke 2005; Stuvøy 2010; Wegren 2011). Such works have highlighted the impact of corruption, elite politics, the inefficiency of Russian bureaucracy, the misuse of resources and structural constraints on internal security problems in Russia. They, however, largely considered the Russian domestic security context as distinct to the international context of Russian foreign security policy (Hedenskog et al. 2005).

Whilst both sets of work provide valuable insights into Russian security policy, they proceed from a self-imposed and artificial separation between the internal/domestic or the external/international spheres of the Russian policymaking context, resulting in assessments exclusively focused on one or the other. As such, the interconnections and interrelationship between the domestic and foreign contexts of Russian security policy remain under-analysed. This book seeks to contribute to this gap in understanding, by approaching its analysis of the evolution of Russian security policy since 2000 from a perspective that considers the domestic and foreign security policy contexts as interrelated around an internal-external security nexus, whereby the internal and external spheres impacts on, and are impacted by, one another. In this way, it seeks to make a contribution to the existent literature by providing a comprehensive account of the evolution of Russian security policy from 2000 to 2014.

A post-positivist account of the internal-external nexus in Russian security policy

In large part, the self-governing and largely artificial separation between the internal and the external context within the analysis of Russian security policy stems from the fact that most studies take their theoretical lead from the realist perspective in IR. In contemporary IR, a structural realist perspective remains the default approach to analysis. Within such perspectives, states are treated as ‘black boxed’ units within an international system defined by anarchy, whereby the behaviour of and interaction between these units becomes the sole focus of analysis, with this being determined by the shifting balance-of-power or order within the system. In other words, developments inside state units are excluded from the analysis, and deemed irrelevant to the task in hand: analysis of the structural determinants governing state’s behaviour towards each other (e.g. Waltz 1979). Against this background, many studies of Russian security policy – either explicitly, or implicitly by virtue of the fact that they underlie many proclaimed a-theoretical works – take their lead from such assumptions, and thus focus on the external dimension and exclude the internal.

In recent years, and in large part seeking to escape this ‘black boxing’ of domestic factors, a number of studies have sought to provide a post-positivist reading of Russian security policy (Neumann 2005; Hopf 2005; Morozov 2008; Tsygankov 2005, 2007, 2013; Clunan 2009). Thus, rather than focusing on examining objective structural determinants of Russian security behaviour and relationships with other actors, these works have sought to address post-positivist inspired research questions relating to how Russia interprets itself, others and the contexts in which its functions, and how this came to impact on certain policy decisions and actions. An illustrative example of how this approach to the analysis of Russian security policy switches the focus of investigation from ‘why’ to ‘how’ questions is that such studies are not interested in whether Russia is objectively a ‘Great Power’ within the international system, but rather in ‘how’ Russia has sought to construct its identity as based on being a ‘Great Power’, and, in turn, how this impacts on its security policy. Hence, the focus is on the nature and interrelationship between state identity and security, and the key principles, norms, discourses and parameters within this relationship (Lomagin 2007; Kassianova 2001; Hopf 2005; Williams and Neumann 2000). These studies demonstrate the way in which particular identity constructions – such as the example above of Russia as a ‘Great Power’ – enable, but also constrain, foreign and security policy options and outcomes (Clunan 2009; Tsygankov 2013).

However, as with positivist research on Russian security, most of these studies focus primarily on Russia’s external security policy (Blum 2008; Neumann 2005; Morozov 2008; Tsygankov 2005, 2007, 2013; Clunan 2009), with the analysis approached from a foreign policy perspective. Hence, while the adoption of a post-positivist perspective opens up the possibility of extending the focus of investigation to include how domestic dynamics influence on foreign policy, and vice versa, the majority of these studies have taken a unidirectional focus: how domestic state identity shapes foreign policy. Therefore, there is a lack of post-positivist research on Russia’s internal security policy in relation to its wider state and security agendas, and which traces the interrelationship between the internal and external security context in a bidirectional perspective around an internal-external security nexus. This book sets out to address this gap in pos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• CSS Studies in Security and International Relations
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Analysing security in a non-Western context
• PART I 1999–2000
• PART II 2000–2004
• PART III 2004–2008
• PART IV 2008
• Bibliography
• Index