Empires of Eurasia: how imperial legacies shape international security

In: Yale scholarship online

Abstract

"Eurasia's major powers - China, Iran, Russia, and Turkey - increasingly intervene across their borders while seeking to pull their smaller neighbors more firmly into their respective orbits. While analysts have focused on the role of leaders like Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in explaining this drive to dominate neighbors and pull away from the Western-dominated international system, they have paid less attention to the role of imperial legacies. Jeffrey Mankoff argues that what unites these contemporary Eurasian powers is their status as heirs to vast terrestrial empires, namely the Qing, Safavid, Romanov, and Ottoman dynasties. The collapse of these empires in the early twentieth century left all four states deeply entangled with the lands and peoples along their periphery but outside their formal borders. Today they have all found new opportunities to project power within and beyond their borders in patterns shaped by their respective imperial pasts. Relying on a range of primary and secondary sources and dozens of interviews with scholars, officials, analysts, diplomats, business people, journalists, and others across Eurasia, this book offers the first comparative analysis of the role of imperial legacies in shaping 21st century Eurasian geopolitics"--