International Institute for Strategic Studies?

The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) was established in 1992 by a consortium of European, American, and Commonwealth governments to provide independent analysis of the territorial, political, and security consequences of Soviet collapse. Its founding charter named as priorities the monitoring of the Union of Soviet Sovereign States and its relationships with the newly independent departed republics, the management of the inherited nuclear arsenal and its control, the humanitarian crises across the South Caucasus, and the uncertain future of Europe in the absence of Soviet territorial claims on the east.

Unlike earlier Cold War institutions designed to monitor an adversary state, the IISS was chartered to provide technical assistance to the Vienna Monitoring Office and diplomatic transparency to governments managing the immediate fallout of the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords. Its Moscow office, established in early 1993, maintained relationships with researchers and officials across the remaining republics. A secondary presence in Nur-Sultan (then still known as Akmola) tracked resource politics in Kazakhstan. A third office in Tbilisi served as the point of contact for conflict analysis in the disputed territories of the South Caucasus.

The Institute's early work focused on three interconnected problems. The first was the problem of nuclear inheritance: no single Union successor held all Soviet warheads, and the question of whether a central command structure could control dispersed arsenals across Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus persisted through the mid-1990s. The IISS published technical assessments on verification protocols and force structure stability that informed negotiations on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. A second line of inquiry examined the fiscal capacity of the Union confederation itself. The Union Rouble crisis of 1998 produced a spike in IISS reports on currency regimes and Confederal Drift, arguing that without a functioning fiscal union, the confederation would degrade into a series of regional economies oriented toward external partners. This forecast, published two years before the Tyumen Compact, proved influential in later scholarship on Energy Federalism and the Limits of Union Coordination.

The third priority was humanitarian monitoring and conflict documentation across the frozen conflict zones. IISS teams conducted extensive field research on the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute and documented civilian casualties and displacement flows in the disputed territories between Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Union. This work fed into reports to the International Committee of the Red Cross and into the archival record later cited by scholars of the Long Goodbye process. The Institute's willingness to name war crimes and ethnic cleansing in territories controlled by both Union and independent forces made its reports controversial; the Russian government suspended its Moscow office access in 1995 over a report on Russian military conduct in the Sakha region during a diamond mining dispute, though the office resumed operations in 1997.

The Blagoveshchensk Framework of 2005 shifted the IISS research agenda. As China became the primary external financier of Union oil exports, the Institute expanded its Beijing office and commissioned studies on Sino-Union economic integration and its political consequences. The expansion of China Development Bank lending reshaped both the Union's external alignments and the Institute's own funding: by 2010, Chinese research foundations were a significant source of IISS grant revenue, a shift that prompted internal debate among staff over editorial independence.

After 2014 and the Tyumen Compact, the IISS refocused on regional fragmentation analysis. The Institute published extensive studies on the transfer of fiscal authority to Siberia, on the diverging economic trajectories of energy-exporting republics and the impoverished industrial core, and on the breakdown of Fundamentals of Union Economic Planning. Research on the political economy of the Compact drew on interviews with officials like Yuri Mikhailov and analysis of Siberian Economic Council documents. The Institute's 2015 report, "The End of Central Authority: Confederalism and Resource Nationalism in the Post-Novo-Ogaryovo Union," was the first comprehensive assessment of whether the Union could remain a functional confederation beyond 2020.

The IISS maintains archives of its own research reports, field notes, and institutional correspondence from 1992 to the present, housed in its London headquarters and gradually digitized. Its scholarly journal, Strategic Assessment, publishes peer-reviewed research on Union economics, security, and interstate relations, and has become a primary venue for analysis of Confederal Drift and its long-term consequences. The Institute's training programmes for diplomats and policy analysts from both Union republics and independent successor states have produced successive cohorts of officials navigating the contested boundaries and unresolved claims of the post-Soviet space.