Russia and Globalization: Identity, Security, and Society in an Era of Change

Abstract

Russia and Globalization: Identity, Security, and Society in an Era of Change, Douglas W. Blum, ed. Washington, DC/Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. 383 pp. $60.00Russia and Globalization: Identity, Security, and Society in an Era of Change, edited by Douglas W. Blum, a professor at Providence College and an adjunct professor at Brown University's Watson Institute of International Studies, assembles an impressive array of scholars specializing in fields as far ranging as demography, human rights, and geopolitics. This breadth is one of the book's great strengths, but also one of its biggest weaknesses, as it prevents the authors from adopting a consistent understanding of globalization.The book is divided into two sections, one covering domestic policy and the other foreign policy. Both sections feature contributions from leading scholars at universities in the United States, the European Union, and Russia, with Russian scholars penning seven of the book's thirteen substantive chapters. The individual chapters are generally of high quality, and some, such as Alla Kassianova's essay (chap. 6) on the Russian defense industry or Eduard Solovyev's examination (chap. 11) of the "geopolitical" school of thought, make real contributions to our understanding of how different segments of the Russian elite have coped with having globalization thrust on them at a moment when they were still sorting out the transition from Communism.Nonetheless, because the book suffers from a haphazard selection of themes and conceptual confusion, it ends up being less than the sum of its parts. Any edited volume, especially one with over a dozen separate chapters, runs the risk of being unfocused. However, this problem is compounded by the book's failure to clearly explain what "globalization" means and its inability to ensure that all of the chapters were written specifically with the aim of charting globalization's impact on Russia. In the introduction, Blum and Ulf Hedetoft initially define globalization as "a process of intensifying transnational flows, leading to changed spatial and social relations" (2). They then supplement that fairly neutral definition by adding that globalization is also "an increasingly controlled and politically engineered process of neo-imperial design" (ibid.). Needless to say, the Chinese, South Koreans, and many other beneficiaries of globalization might beg to differ with this rather tendentious definition.The contributors to this volume largely refuse to take up this somewhat tendentious definition of globalization; instead, they adopt widely varying understandings of what globalization actually means and in the process deprive the book of conceptual unity. …