Paper Titles & Abstracts

This paper will take stock of the research methods which have been used to examine EU-Russian relations from the early 1990s to the present. It will also look at how they have evolved. Articles in key peer-reviewed journals in both the Russian and English languages, as well as books that have come out of major publishing houses in the last 20 years will form the subject of review in the first part of the paper. The paper will then address three questions. Firstly, the issue of whether EU-Russian relations are mostly treated as the subject of International Relations or integration studies will be explored. I will also dwell on which methodological tendencies have mostly been reflected in the study of EU-Russian relations to date. Secondly, the paper will shed light on whether there is more similarity in the research methods employed in the studies of the EU's relations with the USA and China, on the one hand, or with candidate countries and ENP partners, on the other hand. Finally, the differences in the positions of Russian and EU researchers will be examined, together with the question of what this tells us about the research subject.