Speaker - Keir Giles
Room 221 Digital Technium, 18th June 2024: 12:00 – 14:00
Where next for Russia?
What kind of future lies in store for Europe depends on the outcome of the conflict in Ukraine. But the same is also true of Russia's own future path. Any prospect of near-term political or social change in Russia depends on how the country will respond to victory or defeat.
In this talk, Keir Giles will consider not only variables and unknowns that depend on the future course of the war, but also the constants and objective factors that will constrain the possible paths of Russia's future development. He will discuss both the scope for political upheaval in Russia following defeat, and the limits to that scope imposed both by the current Russian government and the nature of Russia's history and society.
Drawing on decades of studying - and accurately predicting - Russia, he will place the current episode in the broader sweep of history and consider what that can and cannot tell us about what to expect from Moscow next.
Bio:
Keir Giles is a Senior Consulting Fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Programme of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London. He is also a director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre (CSRC), a group of subject matter experts in Eurasian security, based in Northamptonshire, UK.
After one of the briefest careers on record in the Royal Air Force, followed by travelling widely in the Soviet Union during his first degree in Russian, Keir co-founded the first company providing Western pilots the opportunity to fly Soviet military aircraft, operating from sites near Moscow and in Crimea. He went on to write for several years as Russia correspondent for a range of military and civilian aviation journals. Other positions held while living in Russia included working with Ernst Young and the BBC Monitoring Service (BBCM).
While working with BBCM, he was half of a two-man team setting up the first Monitoring office in the former Soviet Union, in Moscow. Meanwhile he continued to specialise in the Russian military and aviation, leading to a secondment from BBCM to the UK Defence Academy's Conflict Studies Research Centre (CSRC) in 2005. At the Defence Academy, Keir wrote and advised for UK and international government customers on human factors affecting Russian military, defence and security issues, Russian strategy and doctrine, the Russian view of cyber and information security, and Russia's relations with its immediate neighbours in Northern Europe.
Keir now oversees the research and publications programme of the new, independent CSRC, while continuing to write and publish on his own specialist area of Russian approaches to conventional, cyber and information warfare. He is the author of groundbreaking studies on Russian theory, doctrine, and structures for engaging in information and cyber confrontation. This includes "Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West" (Brookings, January 2019), and "Russia's War on Everybody" (Bloomsbury, 2022). Outside the UK, Keir Giles has published and provided advice, analysis and expertise via NATO Defense College, a number of NATO Centres of Excellence, Defence Research and Development Canada, US Army War College, US Naval War College, the Swedish Defence Research Agency, the Portuguese and Ukrainian National Defence Universities and others. His publications are available at https://conflictstudies.academia.edu/KeirGiles
Catering will be provided.
Please use the link below to register for this talk –https://university-swansea.native.fm/event/geopolitical-challenges-research-institute-talk-with-keri-giles/226188
For any further information please contact Kris Stoddard - K.D.Stoddart@Swansea.ac.uk