Introduction

This chapter focuses on Russia’s relations with the Indo-Pacific region. The global International Relations (IR) project may create the possibility for a more intelligible common discourse in the Indo-Pacific among IR scholars. The western study of Russian foreign policy inherited an analytical approach from the study of Soviet foreign policy referred to as “Sovietology,” an approach that focused on empirical information collecting and a politicized analysis written in a journalistic manner. In the twenty-first century, Russian realism became the predominant theoretical approach, although it diverged from Western realism. Much of the work of Russian realism focuses on geo-economics, geopolitics, and the construction of regional and world order, with Russia assuming a leadership role in that world order. Russia’s Eurasianism has been analyzed by the West in conjunction with “status theory” to explain Russia’s quest to regain its status as a great power within a Eurasian bloc even at great cost to its own national interests.