Authors

Discussion

Given Russia’s consecutive military doctrines’ clear messages to its neighbours and beyond on considering the former Soviet area as its “vital sphere of interest” and further elucidation of its enshrined commitment ‘to defend’ thereof, the aim of this paper is to examine the driving forces behind the military doctrines of Russia, on the one hand, and Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, one the other, targeted to illuminate their implications for security dynamics in the post-Soviet space, with an account of the reassessment of both theory and practice applicable therein.

The importance of military doctrines regarding their impact on both international life and states themselves is central to the current debate on the domain. Regardless of their essence—offensive, defensive or deterrent—and determinants affecting the choices, the doctrines are ‘operational’ responses for the states seeking security. Having said that, if a state is permanently driven by security dilemma considerations—and, in the meantime, claims to seek security, what are the parameters of security and consequently, security space it constructs while interacting with other states? What is the red line between expressed and actual identity? Military doctrine—as the expression of fundamental principles to guide the states to achieve national objectives via planning, conducting and evaluating operations—is the point where epistemology and ontology converge by empowering the study on the post-Soviet space security with both descriptive and prescriptive analytical tools. On the top of that, by adopting a pragmatist approach, the study gains additional leverage for explaining intervention response predispositions—not necessarily similar—given the extensive legacy of, or ‘military habit’ inherent to, the Soviet Union.

Intended to be a new theory of practice, the paper, however, while stressing the abundance of realist theory, thwarts to put massive epistemological and ontological burden on the statements deduced by realism’s mainstream simplified theories of geopolitics or ‘Realpolitik’ provided that though the latter could offer a good framework to explain the doctrines devised by the authoritarian regimes, they lack descriptive repertoire of tools to depict the practices employed by the democratizing states that are constructed upon their identities and values as the expression of their interests—and not only geographical space or other ‘unique’ internal traits leading to the adoption of certain types of doctrines. The adopted approach allows to have a theoretically based and empirically sound research that could offer both descriptive and prescriptive menu of tools for outlining the basis behind the system-transformation-oriented doctrines and their consequences for security dynamics in the post-Soviet space.