Lexington Books
Pages: 170
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9¼
978-0-7391-7880-5 • Hardback • April 2013 • $108.00 • (£83.00)
978-1-4985-1100-1 • Paperback • February 2015 • $57.99 • (£45.00)
978-0-7391-7881-2 • eBook • April 2013 • $55.00 • (£42.00)
Michael Slobodchikoff has a Bachelor of Sciences degree in Language from Georgetown University, where he majored in Russian and International Relations, an M.B.A. degree in International Management from Thunderbird, The American Graduate School of International Management, and both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Arizona. He is currently working as an Adjunct Instructor at the University of Arizona, where he is teaching courses on Russian foreign policy. His interest in Russia developed early, and led to extensive travel in Russia and the former Soviet Union. His first trip to the Soviet Union was in 1990, where he witnessed the devolution of the Soviet State, and he made several trips to Russia and the former Soviet states in subsequent years. He saw how Russian foreign policy evolved in the post Soviet years, and this ignited a desire to systematically study the evolution of Russian foreign policy in the post Soviet period.
Figures and Tables
Preface
Chapter 1: Impediments to Cooperation
Chapter 2: Theoretical Approaches to Cooperation
Chapter 3: Soviet-Finnish Relations
Chapter 4: State Motivations for Cooperation
Chapter 5: Treaty Networks
Chapter 6: The Necessity of Cooperation
Chapter 7: Implications of Treaty Networks
Bibliography
This book is a valuable study because Michael Slobodchikoff analyses the region from a particular perspective. . . .The structure of the book is clear and well organised. The author provides a convincing and original explanation for bilateral relations in the former Soviet space by putting treaties and treaty nesting at the centre of the analysis.
— Europe-Asia Studies
[This] book offers a theoretically innovative approach to understanding international cooperation in the post-Soviet Eurasia.
— International Studies Review
Michael Slobodchikoff’s innovative study illuminates important ways by which treaty construction and networks enable states to advance their foreign policy, economic, and security interests. With a focus on Russia’s relations with former Soviet Union states such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, this volume offers careful and timely analyses relevant to Putin period Eurasian politics. Relying on a combination of systematic analyses and focused case studies of inter-state treaty construction, this book enables readers to assess the differing opportunities and constraints that influence both a great power and less powerful states as they engage one another. Strategic Cooperation challenges the assumption that Russia is merely a coercive regional power that can unilaterally realize its ends without constraint. In fact, smaller countries have means by which they can safeguard, and even advance, their agendas, and in fact they are often quite energetic in doing so. Treaty networks, constructed over time, have structured and channeled the intersecting interests of both Russia and its less powerful (but diplomatically active) neighbors.
Slobodchikoff’s volume shows the utility for all states, powerful and not, to engage in strategic cooperation that is more long-term and nuanced in its approach, with the real possibility for all states in a region to achieve many of their interconnected strategic goals.
— John P. Willerton, Professor of Political Science, University of Arizona
Anyone interested in international cooperation and post-Soviet Eurasia should read this book. The nested treaties approach is both original and productive for explaining how states expand their relations even when the resource of trust is not in place.
— Andrei P. Tsygankov, San Francisco State University