About

Across the Steppes is a project covering politics and foreign relations in the post-Soviet world, from the port cities on the Baltic Sea to the vast steppes of Central Asia. This project will cover domestic politics and foreign affairs across a huge area of the world, spanning a number of populations and ethnicities. This will include Russia and its hugely diverse population, Central Asia, the Caucuses, the expansive farmlands of Eastern Europe, and the Baltic nations, as well as key allies and adversaries of the region.

It is only recently that the terminology of a ‘Cold War’ has reappeared in response to Russia’s deteriorating relations with the West, predominantly over Ukraine, forcing academics to reconsider the post-Cold War consensus and the continuation of long-standing historical factors. In this light, this project will provide a unique angle on the post-Soviet sphere by employing a multidisciplinary approach which combines history and politics, focused on not just the Soviet period and the post-Soviet period, but on drawing continuities across the region’s modern history.

The end of the Cold War and the supposed victory of the West has allowed for a number of rather presumptuous conclusions about the inevitable spread of a Western monoculture across the world; and the cessation of geopolitical rivalry in what is commonly reffered to as a ‘global consensus’, as boldly claimed by Francis Fukuyama: the ‘End of History’. In response to this, Across the Steppes illustrates a post-Soviet world that retains its social, political, economic and cultural distinction to the Western world and continues to have a bearing on the rest of the world through its global interactions.

My research focuses on the socio-economic experiences of ordinary people in the post-Soviet world, and how they have adapted from the Soviet state-management of all aspects of life to a globalised, free market society. This research focuses on how the freedoms and the challenges of the post-Soviet world have encouraged labourers to organise in new ways to protect their interests, and how their responses to their past and present realites are creating to an uncertain future; one which is stuck between two systems.

The articles posted for Across the Steppes focus on foreign policy affairs the post-Soviet world and the wider impact they are having on global politic. These dynamics will be explored in-depth through historical comparisons to show how the identities of post-Soviet states very much reflect continuations and breaks with their past.

I hope that this project can provide useful and enlightening insights into how history can inform our understanding of international relations today, and also how the often overlooked post-Soviet world is shaped in new, dynamic ways by the people that inhabit it. The post-Soviet sphere has been treated with a lack of importance, especially with the inexplicable rise of China as the West’s main rival, but the rapidly evolving post-Soviet sphere promises to play a consequential role in an increasingly disconcerting world.