The Geopolitical Blame Game: Russia’s Strategy of Weaponizing Grievances against the West
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Russia harbors both real and imagined grievances. Since the end of the Cold War, the Kremlin has accumulated a litany of complaints about the West – from NATO enlargement to American liberal hegemony, economic sanctions to cultural degeneracy – and amplified these grievances to audiences at home and abroad. Despite the resurgence of resentment politics in Russia, China, and Iran, few studies have examined the phenomenon of national grievance narratives. This thesis fills the gap with a study on the sources and strategic aims of Russia’s grievances against the West. An original dataset of 471 grievances, created by surveying hundreds of Russian presidential speeches, interviews, and strategic documents, charts Russia’s grievance narrative since 1991. Challenging conventional assumptions, a fifth of the grievances in the dataset are instrumental to a revisionist Russian foreign policy. Instrumental grievances, a term this thesis introduces, are tactical complaints that state actors exploit to undermine, challenge, or gain leverage over their target adversary. Russian leaders weaponize grievances as political instruments in four documented ways: to threaten retaliation, to legitimize military aggression abroad, to make counter-accusations, and to shift blame for geopolitical crises. An in-depth case study on Russia’s long-standing grievance against NATO suggests the Russian political elite inflate national security threats to serve their geopolitical ambitions and domestic political interests. Consequently, U.S. policymakers should interpret Russia’s grievance narrative with skepticism and caution. Mistaking an instrumental grievance for harmless rhetoric could lead the United States to overlook the subversive ways that Russia exploits grievances to deceive and undermine the West.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 19, 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Samrai, Yasmin |
|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Kathryn, Stoner |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Center for International Security and Cooperation |
Subjects
| Subject | Center for International Security and Cooperation |
|---|---|
| Subject | Russian foreign policy |
| Subject | grievance narratives |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Samrai, Yasmin. (2021). The Geopolitical Blame Game: Russia’s Strategy of Weaponizing Grievances against the West. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/nf523cr9725
Collection
Stanford University, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies, Theses
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- Contact
- ysamrai@stanford.edu
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