The research project explores how Russia has adapted to global structural change in the 21^st century. It argues that in adapting to a changing global political and economic world order, the Russian state, corporate actors and Russian society depend on extended networks of brokers – individual, economic, or institutional actors mediating between changing external constraints and the resources and opportunities of Russia’s domestic political-economic regime. The project focuses on four constitutive dimensions of global change – the relative political-economic rise of the Global South, the gradual decarbonisation of the world economy, the deep financialisation of global capitalism, and the advent of economic sanctions. The study is the first to conceptualize, empirically reconstruct and visualize Russia’s adaptation brokers, including their temporal and cross-sectoral dynamics, based on novel datasets and drawing on Social Network Analysis (SNA) methodologies. Moreover, utilizing both statistical analysis and qualitative comparison, it aims at setting Russia’s networked adaptation brokerage and the Russian state’s strive for unbound political-economic sovereignty under Vladimir Putin into a globally comparative dialogue with other countries. The project is located at the intersection of scholarship on state-led development, economic sovereignty, transnational elite networks and brokerage in the global economy.

• Who and where are Russia’s adaptation brokers?
• What are the temporal dynamics of Russia’s adaptation brokerage across the four constitutive dimensions of global change?
• How does Russia’s adaptation brokerage compare to other cases?

• Network data collection through OSINT techniques
• Web scraping
• Media analysis and interviews
• Social network analysis
• Statistical, qualitative and comparative analysis of network patterns