Taught by Dr. Adam Stulberg, Sam Nunn Professor and School Chair, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Tech and Stephan De Spiegeleire, Principal Scientist, Hague Centre for Security Studies

Sound Familiar?
 “Have I read enough? What am I missing?”
 “I found 3,000 papers. Now what?”
 “My lit review is 50 pages of summary. Where’s the actual insight?”
 “Everyone cites the same 10 papers. Is that really the whole field?”
 “How do I deal with sources in languages I don’t understand”
 “My committee wants ‘systematic analysis’ but I’m just… reading and highlighting?”

You’re not alone. Traditional research methods weren’t built for an era of 200 million scholarly articles, multilingual corpora, and information overload. But new tools are.

Russia and Eurasia Program at The Fletcher School invites you to learn over three evenings — and immediately apply — new research methods leading scholars from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies have developed through major multi-year projects analyzing Russian strategic discourse, grey zone conflict, Russian Red Line Statements, the systematic mapping of the echoes of Russian philosophers from the 19th to the 21st century on Russian contemporary policy debates, and many more topics. Although much of our work focuses on Russian Foreign, Security and Defense Policy, we want to point out that the same approach can also be applied to other topics.

This is not just a lecture series. You’ll work on YOUR research topic throughout. By the end, you’ll have a bibliometric corpus specification, a custom taxonomy, sample classifications with reliability metrics, and a methodology your committee will respect.

The Methods Behind Real Research

These aren’t theoretical techniques. We’ll show you the exact pipelines behind some cutting edge research project the RuBase team has worked on for the past 2 years:

WACKO — Mapping the philosophical worldview of Kremlin discourse (how the ‘Russian exceptionalist’ semantic echoes of 1,000+ Russian philosopher books resonate in 2,500+ contemporary Russian official documents) – and why that matters (we call Russia’s geostrategic ‘operating system’)

Putin’s Red Lines — Time-series analysis of deterrent rhetoric (finding: red lines don’t – yet! -correlate with Western provocations OR vice versa; BUT we find more evidence for ‘reflexive control’; than for traditional OR modified Western explanations)

Grey Horizon — Taxonomizing below-threshold conflict (1,400 taxa across 13 dimensions)

Russian Regeneration— Taxonomizing Russian regeneration capabilities (massive, diverse dataset of over 1 million taxonomically annotated text chunks)

Russian Military Space — Taxonomizing Russian Military Space capabilities and views (smallish (~1500 docs), diverse dataset)

and more!

You’ll learn the same methods — then apply them to your questions.

Adam N. Stulberg is Sam Nunn Professor and Chair at Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech. He specializes in international security, nuclear nonproliferation, energy geopolitics, and Eurasian politics. His research addresses issues of strategic stability, gray-zone conflict, Russia-China relations, the changing nuclear energy landscape, and energy security dilemmas. Dr. Stulberg earned a Ph.D. from UCLA, an M.A. from Columbia University, and a B.A. from the University of Michigan. He previously worked as a consultant at RAND, served at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and consulted for the Carnegie Corporation and the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. He has authored or edited five books—including well-known works on Russia’s energy statecraft and nuclear security—and has published widely in the leading academic and policy journals such as Security Studies, Review of International Political Economy, Europe-Asia Studies, Energy Research & Social Science, Orbis, Problems of Post-Communism, The Nonproliferation Review, and Foreign Affairs. He also serves as a Senior Faculty Advisor at Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute.

Stephan De Spiegeleire is Principal Scientist at HCSS. He has Master’s degrees from the Graduate Institute in Geneva and Columbia University in New York, as well as a C.Phil. degree in Political Science from UCLA. He worked for the RAND Corporation for nearly ten years, interrupted by stints at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik and the WEU’s Institute for Security Studies. Mr. De Spiegeleire started out as a Soviet specialist, but has since branched out into several fields of international security and defense policy. His current work at HCSS focuses on strategic defense management, security resilience, network-centrism, capabilities-based planning, and the transformation of defense planning. He is particularly active in HCSS’s security foresight efforts to inform national and European security policy planning in the broader sense. He also teaches at Webster University in Leiden. Stephan keeps a personal blog, where he records his reflections on his fields of expertise. Please visit: gettingdefenseright.blogspot.com.

Format: In Person Only

Venue: The Fletcher School, Tufts University, Room TBC

Dates: March 11, 12, and 13, 2026

Time: 5:30pm-8:30pm

Refreshments will be offered.

Number of seats is limited. By registering, participants commit to attending the entire workshop over three evenings. 

Register by filling out the Google Form here.