Avrasya meydan okumasıyla test edilen bölgeselleşme: Sovyet sonrası Avrasya'da hegemonik düzenin kurumsallaşması (1991-2022)

This thesis offers a comprehensive analysis of how the deepening of institutional cooperation in post-Soviet Eurasia, notably through the project of regional economic integration, is designed to maintain and strengthen the regional hierarchical order. As part of a regional hierarchical order in post-Soviet Eurasia with Russia at the apex, the institutionalization of Eurasian cooperation represents a dynamic process through which Russian regional hegemony adapts to the demands of the current international system. The thesis deals with post-Soviet regionalism, focusing primarily on Russian perspectives, and examining the successive phases marked by key events and developments. By using a diachronic approach, the evolution of Russia's regional cooperation perspective is studied, in light of the specificities of each phase since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This thesis focuses on the entire history of post-Soviet regionalism as a continuous process, without privileging a particular stage of the cooperation process so as not to treat post-Soviet Eurasian regionalism as a finished product. The evolution of the interaction between the modalities of regional cooperation and the formation of an institutionalized hierarchical order in post-Soviet Eurasia is examined from the perspective of a "double pendulum movement," which involves two great interconnected pendulums. The first pendulum shows how Russia's political strategies oscillate between hard and soft (normative) hegemony in terms of political and economic interactions with the international system, while the second pendulum describes how these strategies determine changes in the organization of regional governance. The theoretical framework of the study is eclectic. The assumptions of the neorealist theory are used to understand Russian regional cooperation policy towards post-Soviet Eurasia. Also, two operative concepts, regionalism, and regional hegemony are advanced, with the links between the two being analyzed through Thomas Pedersen's "cooperative hegemony" method of analysis. It is about "ideational-institutional realism," which makes it possible to deal with regional cooperation initiatives within the framework of a neorealist analysis of these two concepts, also taking into account the perspectives of liberal institutionalism and constructivism.