"RUSSIA ALWAYS PLAYS THE HEAVY:" EUROPEAN SECURITY, THE WAR IN UKRAINE, AND INSTITUTIONAL RESILIENCE.

• Author: Poast, Paul

Paul Poast is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where his research focuses on international relations and quantitative methodology. He is also a frequent guest on the podcast circuit and, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, has taken that opportunity to inform audiences of both the ongoing war and his work. The Journal spoke with Professor Poast to discuss his willingness to share his work with both academic and lay audiences, the most recent developments in Ukraine and the larger Shockwaves emanating throughout politics and institutions, and why big crises don't always generate the big changes one might expect.

Journal of International Affairs (JIA): Before we discuss your research and the state of the conflict in Ukraine, it's worth noting that you've been very active on the podcast circuit and on Twitter. In a strange way, the war has brought your work to a much wider audience.

Paul Poast (PP): It's always this very awkward Catch-22. Because it's great to have that outreach. At the same time, it's because something really horrible is happening. So that's the Catch-22 of academics in my area of work. I think it's the curse, as they like to say: May your research always be relevant. And that's very much the case now.

JIA: You have demonstrated a willingness to take your work to a broader non-academic audience. Where does that come from? Is it a willingness to respond to solicitations, or does it come internally from yourself?

PP: I'd say it's absolutely a little bit of both. You'd be surprised by the number of people who are not willing to say yes to an interview to talk to people. There are quite a few folks who would rather not do that, and I'm someone who is willing to do that. It's the old saying: 80% of success is just showing up. Then that leads to the more fundamental question, which is, why is it that I'm willing to say yes? And for that, I do think that there is a responsibility for at least somebody in academia to do this. I do think that there is a responsibility for academics as a whole, and hence for some individuals who feel inclined to do it, to be able to inform the public. I do think that there is a responsibility for us to do that, and this is something that I personally enjoy doing. I feel like maybe I even have an ability to do it, a skill at it, and that's become evident through the response that I've received over the years to my engagement on Twitter.

And so, as a result, I do take this as a responsibility to be someone who tries to inform the public about international politics, how scholars think about international politics, and also do that in a way not just to help the public, but also to help my academic discipline. To show the value of studying international politics from an academic perspective. So often, people see world events, or they hear about a professor of international politics, and they think, "Don't they just watch CNN all day, and then just comment on it?" They don't realize what it means to actually do academic research. And then why is it even relevant? This is something that our discipline as a whole has gone through kind of a moment trying to think about. This led to a whole initiative called "Bridging the Gap," (i) for example, trying to make our research more relevant to the public, and even more specifically to policymakers. And so that is really where this comes from: I do have a desire to inform the public, to bring that forward, and to use my platform as a professor at the University of Chicago to help inform things. But I also recognize that I have an ability to do that. Not everybody does, not everybody has a desire to do that. Because of that, that's what really drives me to do this.

JIA: Regarding your work, what are some of the things that you're currently thinking about? And how do those relate to what's going on in the world right now? Put another way, have you had to pivot what you're thinking about in your own work over the last year or so, or has it actually aligned quite well?

PP: it's aligned almost too well. And what I mean by that is, I've been going around, since 2019, giving a talk at various seminars, universities, institutes, and so forth. Even in my own class, I've been giving a talk, and the title of that talk is, "Man, Russia, and War." That title, first of all, is a play on the title of the famous book by Kenneth Waltz--of course, famous in our discipline. I don't know how famous it is more generally, but it's a very well-known general book by Kenneth Waltz titled "Man, the State, and War" published in 1959. (ii) What I argue in this talk that I've been giving, which is going to become a book manuscript, is the idea that when we study international conflict we have to ask ourselves a very fundamental question: Are we actually coming up with generalizable ideas about international politics, or are we just simply explaining Russian foreign policy? And the reason why I say that is because if you really start to think about the major security events over, say, the past 200 years, what you start to realize is that there is a constant in all of those, and that is Russia. As a friend of mine, who's also a colleague, said when I was first telling them about this project, "Well yes, Russia always plays the heavy." The idea is that the Russia is always there. Someone's always worried about them. And yes, of course, other countries have played maybe even more prominent roles in their national security affairs--the British in the nineteenth century, Germany in the early to middle twentieth century and, of course, the United States since then--but you always have to ask yourself, who are they countering? Who are they most concerned about? And in all three cases, it turns out, Russia is very prominent in that. And so that's something that I had been going around talking about.

I actually had a very well-received Twitter thread back in 2019 with this argument. And then, all of a sudden, Russia invades Ukraine. At that point, I even had some people reaching out, asking, "Aren't you writing a book about Russia and war? How does this change your thinking on this?" In many ways, it's kind of the epitome of this academic curse I was talking about, may your research always be relevant. On the one hand, part of me is kicking myself for not having that book already done, because I'm thinking, "Wow, if that book had already been done in this year, look at it, it would have been amazing." It wasn't because I, like many people, have had Covid disrupt various things and slow down the process of what would normally be going on. When I was starting this project in 2019, I didn't anticipate a pandemic starting in 2020. But also, I've come to realize that maybe it's a good thing, because everything that we've been talking about this past year--and it's kind of sad to say that it's going to be over a year since the invasion started, and it's going to go longer than that--everything we've been talking about, and by we, I mean not only myself, but many, many other people I follow on Twitter and in the media, has really informed my thinking about this project. And it has really enhanced my thinking about this project. And I think ultimately this project, the book that's going to come out of this, is going to be much better because of it. So on the one hand, yes, of course it would have been great had that book come out in the winter of 2022. What great timing! But, on the other hand, I actually think it's going to enhance my research, because I've become even more familiar with more experts on Russia. And this has led me to even think more about this process, and it's even in many ways been an example of the exact process that I've been talking about in this research.

JIA: You made it sound like you started out with an interest in arriving at a generalized model of how politics works, and you ran up against the Russian Goliath. Many people have an interest in Russia or Eastern European affairs and then realize that they're actually quite involved, historically. But it sounds like you were the opposite, where an interested in politics generally came up against the reality of Russia's foreign engagement.

PP: That's exactly right. In fact, when I would give this talk, I would even start off the talk by saying, "I am not a Russia scholar. I'm not a Russia expert. But in many ways, that's exactly the point." Instead, my area of expertise is--probably the best label to be used to describe myself as a scholar, and the kind of scholarship I do, is in the peace science tradition, as epitomized by the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the quantitative study of conflict. What that meant was exactly what you just described: is that by studying conflict in general, studying war, studying alliances--I've done a lot of research on alliances--studying the data on these things, what I started to notice was this constant. I started to notice that Russia really shows up a lot in these data. I teach a course here at the University of Chicago titled "Quantitative Security," and I've taught it for a number of years. I always make this joke during the class. I would say, "If you're doing quantitative analysis of conflict, say, looking for general patterns, and you're using regression and statistics to be able to test it, and if you include a variable for Russia, it basically wipes out any results." That was a joke I would make.

You're trying to say, well, there's a democratic peace. Democracies don't fight each other. Or you're trying to say, the balance of power leads to stability, and it turns out that any analysis you do, I would joke, just account for Russia, and it basically accounts for everything. Is that truly the case? Now, there's variations on it. But nevertheless, there would be this comment I would make, and after a while I started to realize that maybe there's a there there with this...