(Russian) Deterrence, we hardly know ye…

See the Volume I of the publication at: https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-25-3250-6 Deterrence is back on the international political agenda. The reappearance of geopolitical competition and great power brinkmanship has rekindled interest in the theory and practice of deterrence. Deterrence has also returned as a guiding concept in the strategic postures of major – and even not-so-major – military powers. It is central to NATO’s efforts to meet Russia’s resurgence; it permeates Russia’s military (and other) efforts to hold off what it sees as a revisionist West; it remains a cornerstone of US grand strategy; and it is part and parcel of the doctrines and behaviors of emerging great powers like China and India. Last but not least, the need for (often massively) increased funding for deterrent capability options is now once again widely shared as a self-evident ‘truth’. But what do we actually know about deterrence? Do scholars and practitioners, amongst and across themselves, really share a common understanding of the term? Do we know whether deterrence ‘works’, and under which circumstances? When it comes to the use of deterrence by a country with, as many argue , a very different strategic culture like Russia – how confident are we that we have really done our homework on fully comprehending it? That we have come up, in genuinely open-minded ways, with rigorous and creative hypotheses to explain Russian deterrent thinking and behavior? That we have systematically amassed and parsed all publicly available cues to find out which of these hypotheses appear better supported by the evidence? This paper sets out to clinically examine the publicly available scholarship on these issues in a systematic way. After an introductory ‘scene-setting’ section follow two sections that attempt to provide an epistemic equivalent to an MRI scan for the field(s) of deterrence studies. The first one of those two consists of a more ‘technical’ bibliometric analysis of the scholarly literature that embodies our (public) understanding of deterrence. It addresses questions like how much scholarly literature has been produced, how well is it being used and debated, how quickly and effectively knowledge is generated and propagated, how collaborative the field is, how thorough it is, etc. The second of the two main sections examines the actual substance of this literature using a variety of both older and more recent tools to map the epistemic landscape that is contained in the literature: how is deterrence defined in these Russian and Western scholarly publications, what are the key terms and topics, how have they changed over time, which ones are particularly popular today, etc. The paper concludes with some final conclusions and recommendations for both the demand and the supply side of knowledge on deterrence in an international security context