Glasgow expertise on Russia is informing the UK’s military
Lead researcher: Professor Beatrice Heuser
University of Glasgow staff and PhD students have been invited to lecture leading British military officers on aspects of Russian military deployment, fighting power and exercises. This has included a series of individual lectures and bespoke seminars for the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters, organised by Professor Beatrice Heuser. Beatrice’s interest in the subject of the tensions that can arise from military exercises dates back to the early 1980s, a period that has been described as the last peak of the Cold War. She did research on this period less than a decade later when documents relating to Warsaw Pact military exercises became available in German archives, inherited from the former German Democratic Republic. These documents give unique insights into planning assumptions of the USSR, which were always that NATO would attack. Similar assumptions are now made in Russian exercises, as the work of some of Beatrice’s PhD students demonstrate. They work on Russian exercises, defence and foreign policy, doctrine past and contemporary, co-supervised by staff from Politics & International Relations (Dr Joanna Szostek), Central and East European Studies (Dr Huseyn Aliyev and Dr Marcin Kaczmarski), and History (Professor Peter Jackson and Dr Damien Van Puyvelde). Other PhD students working with Beatrice on Chinese nuclear strategy and other aspects of strategy complement this cluster of expertise on strategy at the University of Glasgow.