Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue of Asian Perspective focuses on Russia's relations with the Asia Pacific region. The authors-Russian, Chinese, and American-present different theoretical approaches to the topic, including alternatives to the mainstream realist view of Russia as a major power using geopolitical strategies to establish itself in the Asia Pacific and Eurasia. The diverse theoretical approaches to explaining Russian-Asian relations reflect a trend of growing internationalization in Russian studies of international relations (IR). This trend could facilitate Russian contributions to an emerging global IR theory- a project that draws on multiple concepts from both Western and non-Western sources, extrapolating from local knowledge and generalizing to the global (Acharya 2016). The global IR project may create the possibility for a more intelligible common Asia Pacific discourse among IR scholars.