Introduction

This introductory chapter gives an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that the Cold War mentality was one of the reasons that Russia's relations with the West were doomed to failure since the start in 1991. It employs a case-centric research design with the ambition to build a plausible explanation of Russia's foreign policies in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, using theories as heuristic tools that act as frameworks for this analysis. The book also argues that Russia's material power capabilities guide Moscow's foreign policies in all three South Caucasian states. Next, it points out that the differentiation of the independent variable helps to develop a more discriminating analysis of the effectiveness of Russia's material power capabilities and to identify specific factors that favors or hinders the success of each variant.