A Political Economy of Russian Foreign Policy: the Effects of the Natural Resource Sector and the Military Industrial Complex on Russia?s Foreign Relations

This research aims to analyze Russian natural resource sector?s effect on the formation of Russian foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union and until the early 2000s. The main question it tries to answer is why it has been successful in determining the main contours of a relatively peaceful foreign policy in a crises-laden Russia which have had so many reasons to switch to an aggressive behavior. In this regard, the military-industrial complex is the other crucial economic sector referred to frequently. Given the overwhelming nature of the international structure that Russia finds itself in, and given the general change in the worldview of the Russians, it becomes clear that the resource-finance sector on the one hand and the military-industrial complex on the other are much more than mere economic sectors, being material cores of alternative national and international identities. Such a holistic approach involving the international politico-economic context helps to rely on the explanatory power of the legitimacy factor and to go beyond simplistic group preferences in accounting for Russian foreign policy.