Abstract
This paper contributes to the recent debates on international bureaucracies by looking at how the number of Russian citizens working for the UN bodies and agencies changed since the fall of the Soviet Union until today. The main questions are: what are the patterns of Russian representation in international organizations? What factors can explain these patterns? To answer them, an elaborated dataset on Russian citizens employed in the UN and UN-affiliated organizations is prepared.
The main aim of the paper is to describe and explain the reasons behind changes in the share of Russians in the UN as opposed to the overall and regional (Central and Eastern Europe) number of employees. As already shown on the global scale (Parizek, 2016), there is a trend of over-representation of the most powerful states in some institutions and prevalence of the weakest in the others.
Russian case indicates several issues. First, Russian representation has three main trends of institutional staffing: growing, stable, or decreasing.
Second, the percentages of Russian staff-members differ across soft and hard issues. This paper seeks to extract and explain the relations between the two, and by this, shed light on peculiarities of member-states' representation.