Colloquium Event
The Many-Faced Man: Vladimir Putin’s Operational Code
Stephen Dyson & Matthew Parent
University of Connecticut
Monday, September 14
12:15-1:30pm
Oak 438
Free and Open to the Public
Abstract: Fifteen years after coming to prominence, Vladimir Putin remains a confounding figure, whose motivations are a mystery and whose actions continue to surprise. Masha Gessen (2013) calls him “the man without a face” whilst Joshua Yaffa (2014) despairs that studying Putin is “drawing portraits of what is, ultimately, an unknowable subject.” We think this overstates the inscrutability of the Russian president, though not outrageously so. We follow Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy (2014) in abandoning the search for “the one true Putin” in favor of isolating his multiple identities, which are activated and become salient to policy depending upon cues in Putin’s environment. Our methods are 1) quantitative text analysis of almost 1 million words spoken by Putin on foreign policy topics over his time in office, guided by the George / Walker Operational Code construct; 2) qualitative review of the academic, journalistic, policy, and biographical literature on Putin. We delineate four key identities (recurrent leadership postures and associated belief systems) of which Putin is a shifting amalgam: the normal world leader; the control freak; the thug; the opportunist. We link these identities to Putin’s policy actions across his time in office, including the Chechen war, the intervention in Ukraine, and his stance toward the EU, the US, and China. We conclude with some thoughts on what to expect from Putin in the coming months and years.
Speaker Biographies: Stephen Benedict Dyson is an associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. His most recent book is Otherworldly Politics: The International Relations of Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and Battlestar Galactica. Matthew Parent is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Connecticut. His research interests are in security studies, contentious politics, and qualitative methods.
Contact(s): Vin Moscardelli (vin.moscardelli@uconn.edu) and Stephen Dyson (stephen.dyson@uconn.edu)
For more information, contact: Vin Moscardelli at 860-486-1956