Dynamics of Russian Foreign Policy Discourse: Research Based on Data of the MFA of Russia

Student: Belikova Liubov

Educational Programme: Data Journalism (Master)

Year of Graduation: 2020

Russian foreign policy is currently faced with some deep, unresolved issues, among which are lack of influence in the post-soviet region, “The New Cold War” with the West, and overall negative international image of Moscow. These factors make the study significant. The goal of the research is to track changes in Russian foreign policy discourse based on both studying its doctrinal basis and some relevant to the topic, automatically collected text data, namely – 34 thousand texts scraped from the official website of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). These texts are speeches and interviews of the Ministry official representatives, dated 2003—2020. The study shows, that Russian foreign policy negative rhetoric becomes more intensive over time, and the MFA’s discourse is characterized by reactiveness towards the post-soviet region, and prioritizing global challenges over local ones.

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