Event Date: February 29, 2024 - 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Location: FSS 4004, 120 University Private, University of Ottawa

Presented by CIPS and the International Theory Network (ITN)

What explains the revanchism of territorial reduced states? This question has renewed salience amid Russia’s expanded war against Ukraine in 2022. In this talk, we discuss revanchism as a foreign policy preference that involves reclaiming territory once controlled. We also advance a new explanation for revanchism that emphasizes elite continuity in those states that experience territorial loss. Elite continuity matters because the ruling political class in territorially reduced states, which was socialized under the old regime, preserves certain beliefs about world politics and the perceived legitimacy of their territorial claims. We show that elite continuity between the Soviet and post-Soviet political leadership in Moscow helps explain Russia’s revanchism better than those alternative explanations that we derive from the international relations literature. Our argument illuminates variation in other territorially reduced states’ revanchism, such as the post-1871 French Third Republic and the post-1919 German Reich. The argument is based on several novel data sets used to operationalize elite continuity across regimes and on surveys, discursive evidence and other indicators of elite attitudes towards the desirability of reclaiming lost territory.

Speaker:

Alexander Lanoszka is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo. He is also Associate Fellow at the UK-based Council on Geostrategy, Senior Fellow at the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Natolin, Poland. His research addresses alliance politics and military strategy, with a focus on East-Central Europe. He has published in leading peer-reviewed journals such as International Security, International Affairs, and Security Studies. He has also co-written policy monographs on Baltic security and Taiwanese defence strategy. His books include Atomic Assurance: The Alliance Politics of Nuclear Proliferation (Cornell, 2018) and Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century (Polity, 2022). He received his PhD from Princeton University.

Chair:

Srdjan Vucetic is a professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA), University of Ottawa. His research interests are in international security, foreign and defence policy, and the Yugoslav region.