International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   Russian society has changed dramatically since the Soviet disintegration, and the emergence of new theories of international relations heralded this change. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union and its officially sanctioned “Marxist” social science, Russian scholars have been making intellectual headway in adjusting to new realities. Analyzing the emerging Russian IR studies helps us answer some of the key questions about Russia. How does the new Russia see itself in the world? How does it perceive the new international environment? Which social and political institutions does it see as appropriate to develop after the end of the Cold War? These are the questions that are at the heart of the new Russian IR scholarship, and these are the questions that continue to drive Western scholarship about the new Russia. The recent revival of the sociology of knowledge tradition in international studies has drawn scholarly attention to the fact that IR scholarship is grounded in certain social conditions and may reflect cultural premises. Historically the tradition is rooted in work by Karl Mannheim (1936) and Max Weber, among others. (For contemporary scholarship focusing on social foundations of knowledge, see Hoffmann 1977; Weaver 1998 ; Crawford and Jarvis 2001 .) In particular, it has become more common to view international relations as a branch of ... log in or subscribe to read full text