Russian strategic thought and the Commonwealth of Independent states

This article explores how the strategic culture prevalent among member states can enable or hinder regional organisations, extending strategic culture analysis beyond the level of state behaviour to institutionalised multilateral cooperation. Taking the Commonwealth of Independent States as an exemplary case, it examines how Russian strategic culture, as projected and reproduced through its authoritarian epistemic community, might have shaped and, in part, constrained the trajectory of the CIS. Drawing on 275 Russian-language scholarly articles published between 2002 and 2021 and employing reflexive thematic analysis, the study identifies three enduring themes in Russian strategic thought: vulnerability, inadequacy, and regret for missed opportunities. The results reveal enduring contradictions within Russian strategic thinking. In turn, the study’s conceptualisation of the authoritarian epistemic community helps to explain these tensions as forms of cognitive rigidity and selective reinterpretation—a pattern of dissonance noted previously in the literature on Russian policy discourse. These ideational patterns form a persistent cognitive framework within which the CIS operates and thus might have been conditioned by, possibly explaining why the CIS has been all these years both ineffective and indispensable.