Book
After the Storm: Post-Pandemic Trends in the Southern Mediterranean. ISPI – RIAC
The Mediterranean region has faced a significant number of challenges that have stemmed from turbulent events taking place on its Southern shores: conflicts and instability, the migration crisis, disruptions of regional value chains, souring regional relations, and foreign power interferences that have severely affected the region. The Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the Southern Mediterranean, but the health crisis had ambiguous effects on the underlying economic, social, and political trends of the region. It has exposed and exacerbated much of the previous sources of tension and, obscured many of them as public attention moved towards facing the public health emergency. Will the Covid-19 pandemic spur governments and civil societies to action? Or will it just serve as another smokescreen behind which to hide the region's longstanding problems?
While the Libyan crisis has been on and off the frontpages of the international agenda, it is often linked to Russia every time it hits the headlines. Whether the issue rotates around political toing and froing or military tales of the frontline variety, Russia is bound to be somewhere in the heart of the discussion. Of late, a few new dimensions have been added to the Libyan file, of which Turkey and Covid-19 are the most pressing. What exactly does Russia do in the complicated Libyan environment? How does this correlate with the Turkish attempt to gain a foothold in this North African and Mediterranean country? Such questions, and the related commitments and developments on these matters, are the focus of this piece.
Five years have passed since the beginning of the «Arab Spring» in the Middle East and North Africa. Those events were results of different socio-political processes, of major transformation in the region. Today dozens or even hundreds of studies are written about it. Many authors emphasize a rise of activity of new and old terrorist organizations and an increase the number of hotbeds of instability. The most dangerous is the phenomenon of «Islamic State» (IS), challenging the modern system of geopolitical and civilization relations, imposing itself as a «state» with its own ideology and representing a threat to the future world order. In this article we will touch upon the IS cell in Libya where, after the overthrow of the former regime of Muammar Gaddafi, a struggle has began both between the tribes and armed groups of former revolutionary and between different islamist groups.
This article deals with the main problems and issues that have been arisen around the complex and ambiguous situation in the Russian Oriental and African Studies towards the ways of representation, interpretation and evaluation of the Libyan-Chadian conflict in the second half of the twentieth century.
The author investigated the genesis of approaches and assessments of Soviet Oriental School, as well as its heritage had an impact on the development of Libyan Studies in post-Soviet Russia.
He systematized the body of historiographical works on the subject; defined the range of the most controversial issues; identified a number of information gaps and inconsistencies with foreign studies, described their causes; highlighted the main vectors and most perspective cases for study, which were found and developed by the Soviet and Russian scholars.
The paper contains an attempt to actualize experience of the Soviet school of Libyan studies and its approach to research for the role of Islam in the social and political development of Libya after the revolution of 1969. The author’s hypothesis is based on the assertion that a certain section of Soviet orientalists did not agree with the skeptical attitude to the role of Islam in the process of political modernization and state building in Libya of that period as demanded by the dogmatic and theoretical principles of Marxism and Leninism. Suggesting a different view of the problem, they managed to prove the possibility of an alternative vision of the political development and genesis of Libyan society. The author examined and compared the texts of articles and monographs published during the heyday of the discussion about the role of Islam in the process of national liberation struggle and state building in Libya (1970-1980s). We tried to reconstruct the main stages and elements of the discussion and to identify its key theses. The obtained conclusions are of interest in view of their relevance and usefulness for studying a wide range of socio-political processes in Libya in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The article is devoted to the investigation of genesis of regular army as a political institution in conditions of political transit in Libya. The chronological scope of the study covers the historical period from 1951, when a sovereign Libyan state with monarchical form of government appeared, until 2011, when Libyan Jamahiriya ceased to exist. We scrutinize problems of collaboration of army with traditional and modern institutions of Libyan society and state; participation of army in development and implementation of domestic and foreign policy. We also examine how system of checks and balances of participation of army in the political process was established and how it was functioning during in the monarchical (1951-1969), Republican (1969-1976) and Jamahiriya (1976-2011) period. The events of 2011-2014 demonstrate the conservation of discovered trends and patterns of socio-political development of the institution of regular army in the new Libyan state.
Over the last few years, a crisis of legitimacy has beset the liber-al orientation of the post-bipolar world order, which has been reflected in the strain on the multilateral fabric of internation-al coexistence, the functioning of international organizations, and even the institutions of individual states. Most recently, in particular, the signs of disintegration of the international order have multiplied. A sense of global withdrawal of the United States has contributed to the weakening of the international or-der created at the end of World War II also and definitively con-solidated at the end of the Cold War. Furthermore, the growing power of China and the renewed assertiveness of Russia seem to be a prelude to a new phase of depreciation of Western impact on the rest of the world, if not the opening of a great compe-tition for the redistribution of power and international status.
The article deals with the processes of building the information society and security in the CIS in accordance with modern conditions. The main objective is to review existing mechanisms for the formation of a common information space in the Eurasian region, regarded as one of the essential aspects of international integration. The theoretical significance of the work is to determine the main controls of the regional information infrastructure, improved by the development of communication features in a rapid process.The practical component consists in determining the future policies of the region under consideration in building the information society. The study authors used historical-descriptive approach and factual analysis of events having to do with drawing the contours of today's global information society in the regional refraction.
The main result is the fact that the development of information and communication technologies, and network resources leads to increased threats of destabilization of the socio-political situation in view of the emergence of multiple centers that generate the ideological and psychological background. Keeping focused information policy can not be conceived without the collective participation of States in the first place, members of the group leaders of integration - Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Currently, only produced a comprehensive approach to security in the information field in the Eurasian region, but the events in the world, largely thanks to modern technology, make the search for an exit strategy with a much higher speed. The article contributes to the science of international relations, engaging in interdisciplinary thinking that is associated with a transition period in the development of society. A study of current conditions in their relation to the current socio-political patterns of the authors leads to conclusions about the need for cooperation with the network centers of power in the modern information environment, the formation of alternative models of networking, especially in innovation and scientific and technical areas of information policy, and expanding the integration of the field in this region on the information content.
This special publication for the 2012 New Delhi Summit is a collection of articles by government officials from BRICS countries, representatives of international organizations, businessmen and leading researchers.
The list of Russian contributors includes Sergei Lavrov, Foreign Minister of Russia, Maxim Medvedkov, Director of the Trade Negotiations Department of the Russian Ministry of Economic Development, Vladimir Dmitriev, Vnesheconombank Chairman, Alexander Bedritsky, advisor to the Russian President, VadimLukov, Ambassador-at-large of the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry, and representatives of the academic community.
The publication also features articles by the President of Kazakhstan NursultanNazarbayev and internationally respected economist Jim O’Neil, who coined the term “BRIC”. In his article Jim O’Neil speculates about the future of the BRICS countries and the institution as a whole.
The publication addresses important issues of the global agenda, the priorities of BRICS and the Indian Presidency, the policies and competitive advantages of the participants, as well as BRICS institutionalization, enhancing efficiency and accountability of the forum.