ABSTRACT
In focusing especially on foreign policy issues, this chapter has taken on the challenge of examining the ways whereby post-Sovietology might be raised to the level of sound and forward-looking social scientific research, in particular by rooting the study of Russian foreign policy more deeply in the debates found in International Relations. It also argues that should we seriously assign ourselves the task of turning this field of study into a theoretical enterprise, we inevitably encounter fundamental and persistent problems of a much more general character. The chapter demonstrates that the internal theoretical problems of (post-)Sovietology in foreign policy studies can be traced back to more general theoretical problems in social sciences. It discusses Soviet and Russian foreign policies explicitly from the perspective of mainstream International Relations theories. The chapter develops a synthesis-like conceptual framework to be used both in defining the nature of Russian foreign policy decision-making and analysing particular cases of situational decision-making.
