Event

Since his Munich Security conference speech in 2007 Vladimir Putin has identified the West as Public Enemy No 1. Since then he has employed a variety of instruments from cyber-attacks to information warfare to undermine the Western democratic order.

Less well-known is his reference since the Valdai conference in 2013 to Russia as a civilizational state with privileged civilizational interests in countries with significant Russian diasporas. The discourse is one in which the West is identified as an eternal and perpetual enemy of Russia’s cultural identity. It's becoming clear that Russia is on a collision course with the Western world.

Christopher Coker is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics. He is the author of 23 books including his most recent The Rise of the Civilizational State which will be published in 2019. Professor Coker is a regular lecturer at many of the world’s leading defence institutes including the Royal College of Defence Studies in London, the NATO Defence College in Rome and the National Institute of Defence Studies in Tokyo.

Senior Research Fellow at NUPI Patrick Cullen will chair the event.

The event will be live streamed on NUPI’s YouTube channel: