In the framework of the Scientific and Technological Cooperation Programme Switzerland-Russia, Professor Thomas Biersteker, Director of the Programme for the Study of International Governance at the Graduate Institute, and Marina Lebedeva, from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, have been awarded a two-year project funded by the SNSF and entitled “International Relations Studies and Education: A Comparative Analysis of Russian, Swiss, and Canadian Approaches”.

Although many factors influence contemporary international relations, there are good reasons to assume that international relations pedagogy plays an important role in shaping different worldviews and foundational orientations. The purpose of this project is to explore this question with an examination of the international relations education curricula in three countries: Russia, Canada and neutral Switzerland, which recently played an instrumental role in mediating the conflict between Russia and the West over Ukraine while it chaired the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 2014.

The diverse understandings of appropriate global relations characterising our world are not only guided by individual leaders’ explicit preferences and interests, but also by the complex sets of shared ideas and intertwined representations that ultimately shape different decision-makers’ interpretations of the world. From this perspective, how Russian, Canadian and Swiss foreign policy practitioners are educated while being professionalised for future high-level positions and what knowledge they acquire for interpreting issues and questions pertaining to world affairs are highly significant for future relations between these countries. In other words, we hypothesise that the ideas acquired by Russian, Canadian and Swiss foreign policy practitioners during their education trajectory exert important influence on their understandings of appropriate governance, security and economic policies in these regions; ultimately these ideas shape how international and foreign policies are conducted in, between, and beyond these countries.

To conduct this examination, the project focuses on a broad array of professional and graduate education programmes designed to train and prepare foreign and international policy practitioners in Russia, Canada and Switzerland. These countries provide good cases for exploring the relationships between professional and graduate education and international relations because they articulate increasingly distinct orientations in the sphere of foreign policy. Accordingly, a comparative analysis across these three national contexts should provide systematic insights into the way diverse understandings of global governance, security and international relations can be developed and transmitted through professional education programmes in international relations.