In response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and destabilisation of eastern Ukraine, Germany launched a policy-oriented research centre focusing on Russia and the Eastern neighbourhood. This new research centre aims to develop our understanding of international relations in the post-Soviet space and inform European policymakers.
No doubt, there will be a number of opinions on what this centre should look like. But rather than outlining a concept of this new initiative, I propose to argue against one thing – what this centre should not look like.
Learning from our mistakes
The main danger is that this new initiative could reproduce one of the most unfortunate intellectual biases of the current European policymaking community – an excessive focus on the institutional and legal aspects of Europe’s relations with its neighbours and Russia. This bias is matched by a distinct lack of interest in cultural and ethnographic understandings of how European societies are changing.
