Book chapter
Феномен «страха» в политической философии Томаса Гоббса
This paper outlines the phenomenon of «fear» as a component of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) philosophy. The author makes an attempt to submit the concept of the «rational» fear as the basis of political philosophy of the English philosopher, with a special attention given to some «problematic» place of this concept.
In book
The post-Cold War Arctic has seen a transformation from military tension and a focus on national security to a concern for environmental and human security. As a result of this, the globalized Arctic has a high level of peace and stability, maintained by international cooperation between the Arctic states, northern indigenous peoples, sub-national governments and local actors. There has also been a shift from environmental protection to economic activities and, consequently, states easily trump other interests. Now, in the Arctic, these challenges require fresh thinking on a local and global scale. Regional wars, the 'war on terror', and economic crises have posed new threats to Northern security order.
The Working Paper examines the peculiarities of the Russian model of corporate governance and control in the banking sector. The study relies upon theoretical as well as applied research of corporate governance in Russian commercial banks featuring different forms of ownership. We focus on real interests of all stakeholders, namely bank and stock market regulators, bank owners, investors, top managers and other insiders. The Anglo-American concept of corporate governance, based on agency theory and implying outside investors’ control over banks through stock market, is found to bear limited relevance. We suggest some ways of overcoming the gap between formal institutions of governance and the real life.
In this article the author attempts to explain the events occurring in the country taking into account the specificity of the Ukrainian political culture. From the point of view of the author, a key player in the Ukrainian revolution in 2014 was the Ukrainian society itself, and any attempt to comment the situation of modern Ukraine, first of all, should take into account civil conditions of the society itself. Qualitative state of civil society in Ukraine outrun the quality of the ruling elite, which inevitably provokes new confrontations and conflicts.
The paper proposes a political and legal approach to conceptualizing modern democratic state as law-governed, social and secular. It defines legal, institutional, and socio-political characteristics of law-governed, social, and secular state.
This paper uses the banking industry case to show that the boundaries of public property in Russia are blurred. A messy state withdrawal in 1990s left publicly funded assets beyond direct reach of official state bodies. While we identify no less than 50 state-owned banks in a broad sense, the federal government and regional authorities directly control just 4 and 12 institutions, respectively. 31 banks are indirectly state-owned, and their combined share of state-owned banks’ total assets grew from 11% to over a quarter between 2001 and 2010. The state continues to bear financial responsibility for indirectly owned banks, while it does not benefit properly from their activity through dividends nor capitalization nor policy lending. Such banks tend to act as quasi private institutions with weak corporate governance. Influential insiders (top-managers, current and former civil servants) and cronies extract their rent from control over financial flows and occasional appropriation of parts of bank equity.
The purpose of this paper is to carefully assess the size of public sector within the Russian banking industry. We identify and classify at least 78 state-influenced banks. For the state-owned banks, we distinguish between those that are majority-owned by federal executive authorities or Central Bank of Russia, by sub-federal (regional and municipal) authorities, by state-owned enterprises and banks, and by "state corporations". We estimate their combined market share to have reached 56% of total assets by July 1, 2009. Banks indirectly owned by public capital are the fastest-growing group. Concentration is increasing within the public sector of the industry, with the top five state-controlled banking groups in possession of over 49% of assets. We observe a crowding out and erosion of domestic private capital, whose market share is shrinking from year to year. Several of the largest state-owned banks now constitute a de facto intermediate tier at the core of the banking system. We argue that the direction of ownership change in Russian banking is different from that in CEE countries.