I wanted to let you and all the JRL folk know about my new book on Russian
national identity and national security policy that came out with Johns
Hopkins this year, and the review of it by Robert Legvold in the latest
issue of Foreign Affairs. Title and review are below.

Anne L. Clunan, The Social Construction of Russia's Resurgence: Aspirations,
Identity, and Security Interests (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2009).

Legvold's review in Foreign Affairs:
The Social Construction of Russia's Resurgence: Aspirations, Identity, and Security Interests
November/December 2009
Robert Legvold

Clunan does something unusual in this book: she both intervenes in an
academic debate over international relations theory and produces fresh
insight into the wellsprings of contemporary Russian foreign policy. In the
constructivist-realist debate, she favors the constructivists, largely
because she is more interested in how a national identity comes to be than
how a state -- in this case, Russia -- acts once in place. Borrowing from
social psychology, Clunan fashions a subtle but lucid framework for tracing
how different schools of thought develop their aspirations for the country
and how a single one emerges ascendant. She identifies five current national
"self-images" and systematically explains why Vladimir Putin's "statist
developmentalism" has triumphed. In the process, she provides an unusually
nuanced view of what Russia's current national identity is all about.

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