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Joris Van Bladel

Senior Associate Fellow

j.vanbladel@egmontinstitute.be

Russian military and strategic culture, security & defense, strategic forecasting

Biography

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"Land van het grote sterven: Hoe Rusland de westerse logica tart"


Published in February 2025 by Uitgeverij Prometheus. Order your copy here.

 

Dr. Joris Van Bladel is Senior Associate Fellow in the ‘Europe in the World’ programme at the Egmont – Royal Institute for International Relations. He studied Social and Military Sciences at the Royal Military Academy in Brussels and Slavic Languages and Eastern European Cultures at Ghent University and holds a PhD in Arts from the University of Groningen. His doctoral research, The All-volunteer Force in the Russian Mirror: Transformation without Change (2004), explored the persistence of military traditions in post-Soviet Russia.

Throughout and after his military career (1985–2006), he taught and lectured at institutions including the Royal Military Academy, Ghent University, the University of Amsterdam, Uppsala University, and the Technical University of Berlin. He has held research positions at the Center for Russian and East European Studies (University of Toronto) and at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) in Berlin.

His work focuses on Russian (military) culture, strategic thinking, the role of the armed forces in society, and long-term threat assessment, with a particular emphasis on sociological developments. He regularly comments in the media on these issues.

In 2025, he published Land van het Grote Sterven: Hoe Rusland de Westerse logica tart (Prometheus), a widely discussed book that explores the enduring patterns of Russian military thinking and their impact on Western perceptions.

 

Other publications

  • "Der Ukraine-Konflikt, auf der Suche nach einer strategischen Linie und nach diplomatischen alternativen"[The Ukraine conflict, in search of a Strategic Line and diplomatic alternatives], in: Sicher; Und Morgen?, Sicherheitspolitische Jahresvorschau 2015, Direktion für Sicherheitspolitik, Wien, Dezember 2014.
  • “Russia: A Dispositional Regional Power, An Analysis of Russian Hybrid Power Projection Capabilities,” in Walter Feichtinger and Karl Fitsch (Eds.), Instruments of Hybrid Power Projection, Vienna: National Defense Academy, 2015.
  • ‘De gebroken Spiegel, Turkije en Rusland op rampkoers’ [The Broken mirror’ Turkey and Russian heading towards disaster], in Gürkan Çelik en Thijl Sunier (Eds.’) Het Nieuwe Turkije, Europa’s naaste buur in perspectief [The New Turkey, Europe’s Close Neighborhood in Perspective], 2016.
  • “Russlands Strategische Ausrichtung 2016”[Russia’s Strategic Direction 2016], in: Sicher, Und Morgen?, Sicherheitspolitische Jahresvorschau 2016, Direktion für Sicherheitspolitik, Wien, Dezember 2015.
  • “Russlands Kleinkrieg in der Ukraine: Wie der russische Adler seine Flügel schlägt.” [Russia’s Small War in Ukraine: How the Russian Eagle Beats its Wings], in: Walter Feichtinger und Christian Steppan (Eds.), Gordischer Knoten Ukraine, Eine Gesamtstrategische Betrachtung, Vienna: Militärwissenschaftliche Publikationsreihe der Landesverteidigungsakademie, 2017, pp. 203-223.
  • ‘Russian-Turkish Relations at a Volatile Time’ in Roland J. Linden and Gürkan Çelik, Turkey’s Turbulent Journey, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, September 2019, pp. 201-214.

 

Photo © Keke Keukelaar 2024

 

Publications