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This article highlights the importance of interaction between peace missions and local dynamics, drawing on Tsing's work on frictions. It is centred on the United Nations (UN) peace intervention in Timor-Leste, discussing different examples of frictions, which have the potential to undermine or empower the peacebuilding efforts underway. The analysis stresses the unpredictable effects of applying the UN liberal peace model. It is argued that processes of friction, often consisting of an incremental build-up of intermediate results shape and form the (un)sustainability of any peacebuilding process initiated by an external intervention and, consequently, should be identified and analysed in order to enhance or minimize their positive/negative contribution towards building peace.

Russian foreign policy is both an expression of Moscow's internal political dealings around the presidential administration and the bureaucracies that support it, with their focus on the shaping and making of foreign policy, as well as its implementation, which is grounded in Russia's stated goal of its reassertion in the international system as a major power. This is a process that is embedded in continuous interaction between different levels of agency and the construction of understandings and perceptions, both at the domestic and the international level. Looking at foreign policy as a process, the article argues that the study of foreign policy should go beyond strictly positivist assumptions, as relations between the different actors and the foreign policy approaches that these suggest are embedded in structural, material and ideational dimensions. Departing from this conceptual frame, the article looks at Russian foreign policy, seeking to understand how the internal/external linkages take place in the process of policy construction, looking in particular at socialisation processes and normative adaptation.

Raquel (2017), Ukraine and the Restructuring of East-West Relations, in Roger E. Kanet (org.), The Russian Challenge to the European Security Environment. London: Palgrave Macmillan.  The author acknowledges funding for research from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks (ITN-ETN) of the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under grant agreement 'CASPIAN-Around the Caspian: a Doctoral Training for Future Experts in Development and Cooperation with Focus on the Caspian Region' (642709-CASPIAN-H2020-MSCA-ITN-2014). 2 West is understood in this chapter broadly as including the United States (US), the Europea Union (EU) and the Atlantic Alliance. Despite differences in relations between Russia and each of these actors, the chapter looks at the broader relationship between the Western 'whole' and Russia.

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