Russian Language and Cultural Education as a Tool for Developing Intercultural Competence among International Relations Students: A Pedagogical Perspective

International Relations (IR) curricula have, in most institutions, treated foreign-language study and intercultural competence development as adjacent but separately administered requirements: students take a language course in one department and, if their programme offers one at all, an intercultural or area-studies course in another, with little structural expectation that the two will reinforce each other. This paper argues that Russian language and cultural education, taught deliberately as a single integrated pedagogical process rather than as parallel requirements, offers a particularly effective vehicle for developing intercultural competence in IR students, given the continued geopolitical salience of Russian-speaking regions to the discipline and the language's well-documented pedagogical demands, which force a depth of engagement with cultural framing that more instrumentally taught languages sometimes avoid. Drawing on Byram's model of intercultural communicative competence, Deardorff's process model of intercultural competence, and the sociocultural tradition in language pedagogy associated with Vygotsky and Kramsch, together with the empirical literature on Russian-language study-abroad and heritage-learner outcomes, the paper develops a pedagogical framework — Integrated Language-Culture Pedagogy for International Relations (ILCP-IR) — that specifies how Russian-language instruction for IR students should be sequenced and assessed to build not only linguistic proficiency but the attitudes, knowledge, and critical cultural awareness that intercultural competence frameworks treat as its necessary components. A mixed-methods methodology for evaluating the framework against a conventional, non-integrated language-course comparison group is proposed. The paper concludes by considering what the framework implies for IR programme design, instructor training, and the broader case for treating language pedagogy as a core, rather than peripheral, component of intercultural and diplomatic education.