Maria Engqvist

Analyst. Director of the Russia and Eurasia Studies Programme @FOIresearch Intellectual off-road vehicle. Them ol' caveats. ᛁᚴ᛫ᛁᛘ᛫ᛚᛅᚴᛁᚱᚦᛅ.

[Maria Engqvist @MariaEngqvist]

1) Fresh FOI Report from the print: The Future of Warfare in Russian Military Thinking. @FOIresearch https://t.co/50M3zj64Mw

[Maria Engqvist @MariaEngqvist]

@exit266 Thank you @exit266! 🙏

[Maria Engqvist @MariaEngqvist]

14) ”If the threads of the liberal world order are fraying, Russia has indeed helped to pull them. The question is whether the Russian Federation as a state and society has the will and capability to contribute to its imagined multipolar utopia. Agency achieved only through resistance and defiance against a hegemon risks becoming agency confined to obstruction. In a world moving toward transactional power politics, Moscow may find that escaping Western hegemony is easier than escaping its own limitations.” /END🧵

[Maria Engqvist @MariaEngqvist]

From Strategic Outlook 11 @FOIresearch ”Russia: Striving Towards Agency in a Multipolar World Order.” By @MariaEngqvist & @ewannhed. Long Thread!🧵

1) ”Russia’s security policy since the late 1990s reflects a striving for agency in an international system perceived as Western-dominated. However, the ’end of history,’ as proclaimed by political scientist Francis Fukuyama in 1989, meant very different things for the West and for Russia. Since 2014, official discourse increasingly frames the confrontation with the West as a struggle in civilisational and existential terms. Yet Russia’s capacity to exercise agency in a genuinely multipolar order will be constrained by economic and geopolitical limitations.”

[Maria Engqvist @MariaEngqvist]

13) ”For the past thirty years, Russia has undoubtedly exercised the agency that it does possess, both with tanks and trolls. However, Russia needs more than just defiance to prosper in the multipolar world order that it strives for. It needs attraction, capital, and credibility. On the other hand, Russia’s strife for renewal stands in contrast with the country’s struggle against modernity itself. Military power may shatter norms and mutual understandings, but it cannot easily build durable coalitions. Nuclear weapons are a means of deterrence, but in themselves they do not generate prosperity. Civilisational rhetoric may mobilise domestic audiences, but is far more difficult to translate into global appeal.”

[Brendan Simms @brendanpsimms]

“We can distinguish the great powers by a set of common characteristics, which reveal that there are only four great powers that exist today—and they are not necessarily the ones you would expect.” See my piece in @ForeignPolicy introducing ‘The Return of the Great Powers’.

[Maria Engqvist @MariaEngqvist]

Just released from @FOIresearch: the 11th iteration of the Strategic Outlook report. My colleague @ewannhed and myself contributed with a reflection on how Russia faces dilemmas in its own ambitions of multipolarity. https://t.co/GEDKVXYraI

[Maria Engqvist @MariaEngqvist]

@HoansSolo It was a very good essay, I much appreciated it. @shashj

[Hudson Institute @HudsonInstitute]

https://t.co/yiWOPxBy4G

[Shashank Joshi @shashj]

I wrote our cover story this week, a valedictory essay on the changes in war & warfare over my eight years as defence editor. It’s a reflection on the growth & limits of battlefield transparency, the lessons from different wars & the utility of force today https://t.co/5mBbcRGC3A