THE STRATEGIC FORESIGHT INSTITUTE 2012 SPEAKERS SERIES WITH DR LADA L. ROSLYCKY
By Walter Derzko
Toronto
The Strategic Foresight Institute (SFI) kicked off its 2012 Speakers Series at St Vladimir Institute in Toronto on Thursday Feb 2, 2012 with Dr Lada. L. Roslycky, from Kyiv. The goal of the SFI 2012 Speaker Series is to highlight geostrategic topics that will play an important role in the next 6-12 months and may not be on everyone’s radar screen yet.
Dr. Roslycky’s topic in Toronto was the focus of her recently completed dissertation: National Security, the Political Criminal Nexus and Separatism in the post-Soviet States in the Black Sea Region, with a special focus on the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in Ukraine.
Dr. Lada L. Roslycky is a soft power security expert who gained her PhD in International Relations from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen in The Kingdom of the Netherlands. She was a Harvard Black Sea Security Program fellow and has lived and worked in the security sector in Kyiv, Ukraine. During her presentation she presented the manner in which political-criminal relations in the post-Soviet states negatively influenced their democratic transitions, particularly through the threat of separatism. Her areas of expertise include soft power, psychological operations and Euro-Atlantic integration.
After an introduction by Walter Derzko, the executive director of the Strategic Foresight Institute (SFI). Dr Roslycky outlined the essence of “soft power”. Psychological warfare uses soft power - the power of attraction - as a weapon. It lures citizens into believing or doing things they would otherwise not do. It does so by changing the way they view themselves, each other and the world around them. Great states use it to gain territorial power by manipulating human perceptions; even to the extent of strategically promoting ethnic “frozen” conflicts and war. Yet, to date, the legitimacy of such policies and the linkages between soft power and national security have remained relatively unknown. Dr. Roslycky creates the first framework for the empirical analysis of soft power warfare. Soft power wars are fought inside human hearts and minds and are intricately interlinked with the most pivotal and intangible components of national security. Markedly, Roslycky showed in her presentation that informal foreign policies aimed at the acquisition of power are not restricted to the realm of legitimacy.
She presented the political-criminal nexus as a social structure through which states transform transnational organized crime into a foreign policy instrument. In a clear step-by-step analysis, the audience was shown how Russia’s strategy of deterring Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic integration was effectuated by a hostile soft power strategy aimed at promoting pro-Russian separatism in The Autonomous Republic of Crimea. The hearts and minds of the Crimean population were targeted to influence each component of Ukraine’s soft power security. Moreover, this hostile strategy was supported by a Russia-centred, post-Soviet political-criminal nexus made up of intelligence services, government executives and non-governmental organizations (NGO’s). Her research provides new and unique insight into Russian-Ukrainian relations. It shows that knowing the character of a state’s political-criminal nexus facilitates the understanding of its identity and behaviour.
She introduced the concept of the Political Criminal Nexus-- the relationship between organized crime and the state. In Ukraine, the mafia and State have a separate but equal bond of mutuality: The Mafia is an instrument of the State as the State is the instrument of the Mafia. Russian “soft power” aggression against Ukraine includes: cultural (ethnic, linguistic, religious); territorial and collective memory. The key actors of the Post-Soviet Political-Criminal Nexus in Crimea include: Russian Community of Choice and Sevastopol-Crimea-Russia group ( which includes over 100 NGO’s under them), Moscow State University, the FSB (the successor to the KGB), the GRU (Russian military intelligence), other foreign intelligence services, former Moscow mayor Luzhkov, Konstantyn Zatulin and the Russian Orthodox Church.
How are Ukrainian and Russian perceptions modified by the Russian fifth column? Roslycky offered a number of examples at the end of her presentation: Use of NGO’s to promote anti-Western /anti-NATO and anti-democratic sentiment; casting Crimean territoriality into doubt; use of language/education as a political instrument – book and school burning; publishing of “free” anti-state newspapers; (forced) dispersal of passports/ passportization; renaming of streets/towns, cultural centres; hanging Russian flags and plaques, Nazi graffiti on Ukrainian buildings, separatist calls from Russian politicians; use of religion as political instrument – promotion of ROC and Tatar tensions, and modification of shared common memory.
Finally, Roslycky offered suggestions on what can be done to counter this soft power influence and threat: 1) be aware of local soft power security, security threats, actors and relevant objects, 2) consider the roles of the political-criminal nexus 3) legal use the Palermo Treaty and the use of Western sanctions against the Ukrainian regime 4) promotion of “counter” soft power operations and tactics aimed at peacemaking and common interests, instead of calling for a bloody revolution.
The talk was followed by a lively discussion and questions and answers that focused on what can be done next.
For the very first time, this event was broadcast live and recorded over the internet so that anyone in the Diaspora was able to listen and participate in the debate. Online guests from Buffalo, Montreal, Vancouver, Norway, The Netherlands and Ukraine watched this historic event. Anyone who missed the presentation can still watch the online archive that’s available at this link: http://bit.ly/AtZDMf
Anyone who wants to read further about transnational crime in the Black Sea Region can download Dr Roslycky’s paper here http://www.harvard-bssp.org/static/files/327/Organized_Crime_in_Black_Sea.pdf
Dr Roslycky’s book: “The Soft Side of Dark Power” will be published later this year, and a Russian version of the book is currently being translated.
