Rubase: Knowledge base on Russia

Russia is back. After two decades of, albeit checkered, attempts at rapprochement between the West and Russia, the Russian leadership has opted for a more confrontational and forceful foreign and security policy. Along Europe’s periphery, Russia is asserting itself aggressively and Europe once again faces war within its borders. Russia is a factor to be reckoned with, even for the Netherlands, on areas of cyber security, trade, and political influence. But, over the last few decades Western decision-makers have struggled to draw on a deep epistemic body of knowledge on Russia and it’s international thinking, RuBase attempts to rectify this.

Latest Research

Catch up on our latest research on the topic of Russia.

Putting it together by bringing ‘influence’ back in: Exploring European influencing options across different future Russias

Western Proxies Through Russian Eyes

(Russian) Deterrence, we hardly know ye…

Taking Russian Assertiveness Seriously: Letting the data speak

From Blurred Lines to Red Lines: How Countermeasures and Norms Shape Hybrid Conflict | Responding to Russian Disinformation in Peacetime

From Blurred Lines to Red Lines: How Countermeasures and Norms Shape Hybrid Conflict | Protecting Electoral Infrastructure from Russian Cyberoperations

Strategic Communications Capability Building in the Western Balkans

Reimagining Deterrence: Towards Strategic (Dis)Suasion Design

Far-Right Trends in South Eastern Europe: The Influences of Russia, Croatia, Serbia and Albania

Military Competition in Perspective: Trends in Major Powers’ Postures and Perceptions

NATO’s Futures through Russian and Chinese Beholders’ Eyes

Policy Brief: Geopolitical Influences of External Powers in the Western Balkans

Geopolitical Influences of External Powers in the Western Balkans

Global Security Pulse August 2018: (Russian) Political Warfare

Inside the Kremlin House of Mirrors: how liberal democracies can counter Russian disinformation and societal interference

Hoe beschermen wij ons tegen Russische desinformatie?

From Assertiveness to Aggression: Russian Foreign and Security Policy

Beyond the Cold War of Words

Future Issue: Russia

All Research

About RuBase

RuBase is a multi-year research programme that sets out to improve our understanding of Russia’s multi-domain international behaviour. The ‘base’ in RuBase refers both to the knowledge base the team is building and to its (aspirationally) foundational nature.

Why RuBase?

To elicit deeper knowledge and understanding about this topic a variety of new methods are introduced including open-source text- and data-sets and -mining tools explored through both human analysis and (supervised and unsupervised) machine-learning algorithms. This should generate a new visual and interactive knowledge base on Russia. The RuBase will serve as a platform for Russian experts in the field to explore new collaborative ways of cumulative knowledge building on this topic that is only gaining in policy relevance.

What is RuBase?

This multi-year project sets out to explore new text- and number-based datasets, -tools and methods, using a corpus systematically compiled through relevant search queries, combined with different additional data sets like elite opinion surveys, event data sets (GDELT, ICEWS, Phoenix, TERRIER), economic, demographic, military, political datasets, to improve our knowledge about Russia’s multi-domain coercion/international behaviour more broadly. It will yield a new knowledge base on Russia (RuBase) that will be highly visual and interactive.

RuBase will be a knowledge base on Russia’s international coercion/behavior

Using new open-source text- and data-sets and -mining tools to elicit deeper knowledge and understanding

Aiming to expose Russian experts to new datasets and -tools and to examine to how they can enrich our understanding

The project is spearheaded by Georgia-Tech and HCSS and funded by CCNY