From great power to survivalist state : the intentionality of Russia’s security policy through a resilience-identity lens

Analyses of Russia’s security policy and its role in the contemporary world are often reactive, struggling to explain escalatory actions because they underestimate the regime’s internal logic. This paper asks how Russia’s official threat perceptions are constructed and mobilized to legitimate domestic resilience-building measures and internal security consolidation. Instead of assuming that Russia’s security policy is a defensive reaction to objective external threats, we argue that official threat perceptions are primarily endogenous constructions in which the differentiation from the “Other” as a core identity construction strategy, and narratives of encirclement are used to legitimize authoritarian consolidation. The study combines the focus on “differentiation” from the Other as the main strategy of identity construction with the practical role of repression as a pillar of regime resilience. We posit that this threat construction is achieved discursively, by strategically using Russia’s core foreign policy identity ideas (sovereignty, exceptionalism, multipolarity) to reframe external and internal events as existential dangers. These threats are strategically instrumentalized to serve internal regime stability, legitimize authoritarian consolidation and secure the survival of the political system, rather than solely in response to objective external threats. In the context of this paper we address the question of how internal events are being constructed as created threats by external influences. This study contributes to the analysis of how Russia uses its foreign policy identity ideas for the consolidation of internal regime power and provides a clearer understanding of the motivations and the strategies behind Russia’s security posturing. This article does not necessarily forecast the state’s future actions; rather it sets an empirical methodological approach of interaction between the ideas that make up Russia’s foreign policy identity and resilience building measures, and how these are in a co-constituting relationship with the status, intentions, threat perceptions of Russian security policy. In this research we hypothesize that shifts in the instrumentalization of ideas of foreign policy identity can serve as diagnostic indicators of changes in the state’s security strategy and its employment of regime resilience measure for ensuring regime stability. This provides a methodological path for assessing possible trajectories of Russia’s future international role and identifying potential flashpoints of conflict.