Abstract

How do states construct and negotiate identity, role, and status under conditions of strategic asymmetry? This article examines how Russia articulates its identity, role, and international status vis-à-vis China in the Russian Far East (RFE) following the launch of the Special Military Operation (SVO) in February 2022. Treating the RFE as a critical regional arena where domestic and foreign policy intersect, the study analyzes how Russian political elites discursively manage cooperation with China while asserting sovereignty, regional authority, and great-power recognition. The analysis is grounded in constructivist International Relations theory, which conceptualizes identity, role, and status as co-constitutive and performatively enacted through discourse. Empirically, the article employs a computational–constructivist framework that integrates large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and density-based semantic clustering to analyze a corpus of 499 official statements, speeches, and social media posts produced by senior Russian political actors between 2022 and 2025. Rather than treating computational tools as theory-neutral, the study explicitly aligns them with constructivist epistemology, using them to operationalize interpretive concepts at scale while preserving contextual grounding and theoretical coherence.

The findings reveal a highly consistent elite discourse in which Russia presents itself simultaneously as a cooperative and reliable partner to China, a sovereign and independent regional power, and a stabilizing actor in Northeast Asia. Cooperation in infrastructure, energy, and regional development is foregrounded, yet framed as a strategy for managing asymmetry rather than accepting subordination. Russia’s status claims oscillate between assertions of equality and implicit recognition of China’s growing economic and demographic weight, producing a relationship best characterized as managed interdependence. Historical memory and civilizational narratives are repeatedly mobilized to legitimize cooperation and mitigate status anxiety, stabilizing an otherwise indeterminate hierarchy. The article contributes to constructivist scholarship by demonstrating how identity, role, and status can be empirically operationalized through computational discourse analysis without sacrificing interpretive depth. Methodologically, it advances debates on text-as-data in International Relations by showing how generative AI can enhance, rather than replace, theoretically grounded qualitative analysis. Substantively, it offers new insights into how great powers reproduce global identities through localized regional discourse under conditions of geopolitical constraint.