Dr Marcin Kaczmarski -- Glasgow University -- MECACS Public Lecture Series

Between regionalism and regional hierarchies: the comparison of Russia's Eurasian Economic Union and China's Belt and Road Initiative

China and Russia have made substantial efforts -- political, economic, military and institutional -- to re-arrange international politics in the era of lingering Western primacy. Both powers have paid particular attention to their neighbourhoods. They have built a network of patron-client ties with smaller states and provided them with meaningful economic assistance in return for political deference. They began promoting trans-national ideas, such as the community of shared destiny and the Russian World. On top of this, Beijing and Moscow put forward comprehensive visions of how regional-level international politics should function, the New Silk Road and the Eurasian Union/Greater Eurasia respectively. The presentation addresses the question of how Russia and China's regional projects fit with other elements of regional hierarchies that Moscow and Beijing have been constructing in their neighbourhoods.

Marcin is a Lecturer in Security Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences. He is based in the Central and East European Studies subject area. In his research, he focuses on Russia-China relations, Russia's foreign and security policy, comparative regionalism, and the role of rising powers in international politics. Marcin is the author of Russia-China relations in the post-crisis international order (Routledge 2015) and published articles in leading academic journals, including International Affairs, International Politics and Europe-Asia Studies. He was a visiting scholar at the Chengchi University in Taiwan, the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center in Japan, the Aleksanteri Institute in Finland, the Kennan Institute in Washington, DC, and the Shanghai International Studies University in China. Prior to joining the University of Glasgow, Marcin combined research and teaching at the University of Warsaw with policy-oriented analysis for the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Helsinki and the Centre for Eastern Studies in Warsaw.