Alicja Curanović. The Sense of Mission in Russian Foreign Policy: Destined for Greatness! London: Routledge & CRC Press, 248 p

Abstract

Alicja Curanović’s 2021 book The Sense of Mission in Russian Foreign Policy is an important contribution to the study of Russian politics and foreign policy, and since the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Moscow, its importance has only increased. The ultimate failure of “structural” and rational-choice models to account for Russia’s behavior has only reemphasized the importance of approaches that open the “black box” of domestic politics and examine the long-term cultural and identitary patterns which both shape and help legitimize the decision-making in an authoritarian polity relying on pronounced anti-Western discourse and “siege mentality.”