I spent a few days last week in the presence of about 10 academics working in the field of Russian Foreign Policy. As I told them at the end of our meeting, I was struck by three main characteristics of this field: 1) the often astoundingly non-systematic empirical basis of much Russian foreign policy analysis; 2) the stovepiped nature of much of the work; and 3) the lack of any serious attemtp at cumulative knowledge building on this country that is once again become a major policy preoccupation of Western defense and security planners. My main rallying cry was that if we, as a community of experts, want to make a useful contribution to the West's attempt at dealing with a 'new' Russia, we will have to find ways to overcome these three hurdles.


I was invited to a few meetings on Russian foreign policy and Russia-EU relations by the Finnish Aleksanteri Institute and the Finnish Centre of Excellence “Choices of Russian Modernisation” that is funded by the Academy of Finland for the period of 2012-2017 and is co-run by the Aleksanteri Institute and the University of Tampere. Finland retains, in my estimation (although I have to admit that I am unfamiliar with the Chinese and Japanese situation in this area), one of the world's most impressive research infrastructures on Russia. This is not entirely surprising given its history and its 1340-km long border with the Russian Federation. But I have always found Finnish scholars a breath of fresh air in this field.
As probably many of my fellow ex-Sovietologists, I personally experienced the disintegration of the West's reserach infrastructure on the Soviet Union after the end of the Cold War with a significant amount of regret. At RAND, for instance, the group of people that had been working on the Soviet Union collapsed a lot faster than I had anticipated. That is one of the reasons why I decided to move to Germany and the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, which had been created after the image of RAND by Germany's post World War II leadership. And indeed, the European research landscape did not disintegrate quite as quickly as in the US. But it did end up following the same path. There obviously remain island of
 . But that singular focus on


The meeting(s) took place in Helsinki, Saint Petersburg and Tampere at the invitation of the