Rusya'nın Avrasya'daki ittifak stratejileri: Teorik değerlendirmeler

In recent years, Russia's resurgence has been a center of attraction for international relations scholarship. Russia has remarkably enhanced its role in international security through its military power projections and diplomatic activism, although it has been facing a decline in its national power vis-à-vis other great powers like the USA and China. In this regard, one should focus on Russia's foreign policy and external relations rather than its national capabilities to comprehend the dynamics of its resurgence as a great power. Alliances and alignments play a central role in Russian foreign policy, which enable Moscow to pursue its security objectives in collaboration with other significant powers sharing Russia's regional and global interests. This dissertation provides a theoretical analysis of Russia's alignment strategies in Eurasia with a special focus on its relations with the members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). It argues that Russia has always been eager to form asymmetrical military alliances with small post-Soviet states, while it has avoided symmetrical military alliances with major Asian states such as China and India. Russia has preferred more flexible arrangements for security cooperation with those major powers. Different cases of alignments are analyzed through distinct realist approaches towards alignment formation. While examining Russia's alignment strategies and military projections in the post-Soviet space, the study makes references to balance of threat and omnibalancing theories. When analyzing Russia's relations with the SCO members, the research focuses on the soft balancing perspective and Moscow's flexible and pragmatic alignments with other Asian states. The dissertation also discusses how Russia's overall strategy of alignment could contribute to the preservation of Russia's great power status and the establishment of a "multipolar" world in the sense identified by Moscow.