Sociological Strategies for Conflicting Approaches in Russian Foreign Policy

The Russian foreign policy toward various issues is often combined with complexity, ambiguity and conflicts. This fact was true at least in the history of relations between Iran and Russia, so that Russian face is depicted as an unreliable partner for the Iranian citizens and elites. With the importance of this issue, the study aims to answer this central question: what are the reasons for these complexities and conflicts in Russian foreign policy? The research hypothesis is that the conflicting sociological foundations in Russian society produces conflicts in foreign policy; The conflicts that appear in levels of socio-intellectual currents, political parties, and informal patronage networks reproduce conflicting approaches in foreign policy of Russia The findings show that Russian foreign policy is in contention between the following conflicting foreign policy approaches: pro-western liberal, great power balancer, and nationalism in various forms of Russian ethnocentrism, pan-Slavism, regional hegemony and neo-imperialism. This research was conducted within the Constructivism approach in which foreign policy is influenced by internal process and Conflict and cooperation between different socio-cultural orientations.