This book addresses the challenges and opportunities of contemporary and future development of Eurasia. The main theme of the first part of the book is examining the reaction evoked in different countries by the Chinese “Belt and Road Initiative.” The second part analyses other national and international integration and infrastructure projects in Eurasia. This unique publication brings together in one volume works by leading researchers from different countries, all united by their common interest in the political and economic processes unfolding in the Eurasian continent. By offering various points of view from experts from all over the world, this book provides a multi-dimensional analysis of the Eurasian future and will be of value to a wide range of readers, including scholars, publicists, the international business community and decision-makers.

The book focuses most of all on women's and partly on men's agency, to discuss variant ways in which women and men actively use their scopes of action - through political activism, protest, movements, in the military. The book is aiming to dicuss variant perspectives on these issues in different contexts witin Eastern Europe.  How do these in change affect conservative societies and the concepts of masculinity?

The volume is structured in four parts:

I) Floating concepts of Femininities and Masculinities

    (essentially this is a discussion on the role of feminism in the transformation period in Eastern Europe)

II) Political Activism

    (this part deals with political participation of women - also within conservative parties - and of variant forms of protest)

III) Nationalism and Militarization of societies

 (also papers on violence)

IV) Social Roles and Concepts of Women and Men

This book discusses international migration in the newly independent states after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which involved millions of people. Written by authors from 15 countries, it summarizes the population movement over the post-Soviet territories, both within the newly independent states and in other countries over the past 25 years. It focuses on the volume of migration flows, the number and socio-demographic characteristics of migrants, migration factors and the situation of migrants in receiving countries. The authors, who include demographers, economists, geographers, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists, used various methods and sources of information, such as censuses, administrative statistics, the results of mass sample surveys and in-depth interviews. This heterogeneity highlights the multifaceted nature of the topic of migration movements.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the world's largest regional security organisation, possesses most of the attributes traditionally ascribed to an international organisation, but lacks a constitutive treaty and an established international legal personality. Moreover, OSCE decisions are considered mere political commitments and thus not legally binding. As such, it seems to correspond to the general zeitgeist, in which new, less formal actors and forms of international cooperation gain prominence, while traditional actors and instruments of international law are in stagnation. However, an increasing number of voices - including the OSCE participating states - have been advocating for more formal and autonomous OSCE institutional structures, for international legal personality, or even for the adoption of a constitutive treaty. The book analyses why and how these demands have emerged, critically analyses the reform proposals and provides new arguments for revisiting the OSCE legal framework.

Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy traces the transformation of museums from publicly or privately funded heritage institutions into active players in the economic sector of culture. Exploring how this transformation reconfigured cultural diplomacy, the book argues that museums have become autonomous diplomatic players on the world stage. The book offers a comparative analysis across a range of case studies in order to demonstrate that museums have gone global in the era of neoliberal globalisation. Grincheva focuses first on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which is well known for its bold revolutionising strategies of global expansion: museum franchising and global corporatisation. The book then goes on to explore how these strategies were adopted across museums around the world and analyses two cases of post-Guggenheim developments in China and Russia: the K11 Art Mall in Hong Kong and the International Network of Foundations of the State Hermitage Museum in Russia. These cases from more authoritarian political regimes evidence the emergence of alternative avenues of museum diplomacy that no longer depend on government commissions to serve immediate geo-political interests. Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy will be a valuable resource for students, scholars and practitioners of contemporary museology and cultural diplomacy. Documenting new developments in museum diplomacy, the book will be particularly interesting to museum and heritage practitioners and policymakers involved in international exchanges or official programs of cultural diplomacy.

This book is an anthology of essays penned by distinguished experts from around the world to commemorate life time contribution of Sanjaya Baru to the discipline of Geo-economics in India and globally. Curated and published by CUTS International, the book contains 20 essays from 21 distinguished authors,who amongst others include, noted economist Jagdish Bhagwati, two former foreign Secretaries Shyam Saran and S Jaishankar, former US Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill, Secretary General CUTS International Pradeep Mehta, Director NMML Shakti Sinha and former DG, WTO Pascal Lamy. In the current times when the world order is being rapidly reconfigured, this book is a useful resource for the government, think tanks, academia, civil society and all those interested in strategic affairs.

Language policy and usage in the post-communist region have continually attracted wide political, media, and expert attention since the disintegration of the USSR in 1991. How are these issues politicized in contemporary Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine? This study presents a cross-cultural qualitative and quantitative analysis of publications in leading Russian-language blogs and news websites of these three post-Soviet states during the period of 2004–2017. The most notable difference observed between Ukraine and the two Baltic countries is that many Russian-writing users in Ukraine’s internet tend to support the position that the state language, i.e. Ukrainian, is discriminated against and needs special protection by the state, whereas the majority of the Russian-speaking commentators on selected Estonian and Latvian news websites advocate for introducing Russian as a second state language. Despite attempts of Ukraine’s government to Ukrainize public space, the position of Ukrainian is still perceived, even by many Russian-writing commentators and bloggers, as being ‘precarious’ and ‘vulnerable’. This became especially visible in debates after the Revolution of Dignity, when the number of supporters of the introduction of Russian as second state language significantly decreased. In the Russian-language sector of Estonian and Latvian news websites and blogs, in contrast, the majority of online users continually reproduce the image of ‘victims’ of nation-building. They often claim that their political, as well as economic rights, are significantly limited in comparison to ethnic Estonians and Latvians. The results of Maksimovtsova’s research illustrate that, notwithstanding differences between the Estonian as well as Latvian cases, on the one hand, and Ukraine, on the other, there is an ongoing process of convergence of debates in Ukraine to those held in the other two countries analyzed in terms of an increased degree of ‘discursive decommunization’ and ‘derussification’.

Contributors to this volume discuss a variety of ways the African past (African history) influences the present-day of Africans on the continent and in diaspora: cultural (historical) memory as a factor of public (mass) consciousness; the impact of the historical past on contemporary political, social, and cultural processes in Africa and African diaspora.

This volume is an output of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE).

Based on the synthesis of a large empirical and theoretical literature on centre-region relations in China and Russia, Federalism in China and Russia is one of the first attempts to integrate this literature from different disciplines into a coherent common framework. Libman and Rochlitz argue that the divergence in growth performance between Russia and China can be – at least partially – explained by a number of features of the Chinese system of centre-regional relations.The authors offer a comparative analysis of the development of centre-region relations in Russia and in China and explore several dimensions of these relations: fiscal ties and incentives; bureaucratic practices; flows of information; and local government practices, while addressing the determinants of divergence between both countries. They also examine how the Chinese system has recently started to change, by adopting several features of the Russian model, which might be one of the reasons for China’s declining growth performance in recent years.Federalism in China and Russia should be read by scholars in public economics, political economy and comparative politics, as well as by students and policy analysts. For scholars, the book serves as a point of reference in studying the comparative evolution of the two countries. It will enrich the discussion on fiscal federalism, centre-region relations and sub-national political regimes, and could potentially become an important part of syllabi in political economy, public economics and comparative politics courses. For policy analysts, the book offers a comprehensive survey of the evolution of centre-periphery relations of the two countries and the differences between them, which is important to better understand the overall development of Russia and China.

On 15 March 2019, the first “Connecting Eurasia Dialogue: From the Atlantic to the Pacific” was held in Brussels, at Europe’s political heart. The event was organized by the Roscongress Foundation and the Conoscere Eurasia Association with the support of the Association of European Businesses and the Belgian-Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce. Amid the current political cooldown, this was a unique gathering, enabling a high-level dialogue on trade, economic, and integration issues among stakeholders from the wider Eurasian space, including the European Union (EU), the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and China. The focus of high-level policy makers and top business executives attended the Dialogue was on challenges and opportunities of the EU’s engagement with the EAEU, harmonization of soft infrastructure to enhance trans-Eurasian connectivity, and the EAEU’s single pharmaceutical market. This IIASA discussion paper provides a summary of the deliberations, supported by research from inside and outside the Institute.

The book pursues the following three aims:

• First and foremost, we want to help conceptualize the Arctic as a multifaceted region within a changing global context, which is both affected by it and affecting it.

• Secondly, we aim to describe the major drivers of these GlobalArctic dynamics; namely, ecological changes, changes in resources extraction practices and corresponding infrastructure development, including urbanization, as well as changes in geopolitical configurations, and changes in Arctic economies, societies and cultures.

• Thirdly, we aim to define, analyze, and discuss concrete ways to address these changes in the GlobalArctic, including mitigation, adaptation, and resiliencebuilding. The purpose is to offer the relevant GlobalArctic stakeholders innovative approaches, methods, best practices, and solutions to address these unprecedented dynamics. Here the GlobalArctic is a (new) geopolitical context.

This book is based on the collection of articles centered around Russia and its policies. The articles are grouped under three parts. The first part contains articles on international relations, Russian foreign policy, and the situation in the world. The main themes they cover include Russian policy in Asia and the Eurasian integration — in which Moscow plays the most active role.

The second part looks at the theorization of Russia’s internal processes, issues concerning reforms to the communist system, its troubled transition from Communism, and analysis of the country’s current political regime. While elaborating on various reforms and transition from the communist system, the author has suggested certain alternatives concepts. Many of the articles analyze the shortcomings and inconsistencies of the modern Russian political system.

The third part is devoted to current issues in Russian politics, the democratization process, growing authoritarian tendencies, mass protests, and that evaluate the programs and policies of individual leaders. The book will be of interest to those specializing in Russian foreign and domestic policy as well as to all those interested in following the developments of this country, its role in the world, and the global situation in general.

The Handbook of Research on International Collaboration, Economic Development, and Sustainability in the Arctic discusses the perspectives and major challenges of the investment collaboration and development and commercial use of trade routes in the Arctic. Featuring research on topics such as agricultural production, environmental resources, and investment collaboration, this book is ideally designed for policymakers, business leaders, and environmental researchers seeking coverage on new practices and solutions in the sphere of achieving sustainability in economic exploration of the Artic region

A number of recent events in the last decade have renewed interest in Russian discourses on international law. This book evaluates and presents a contemporary analysis of Russian discourses on international law from various perspectives, including sociological, theoretical, political and philosophical. The aim is to identify how Russian interacts with international law, the reasons behind such interactions, and how such interactions compare with the general practice of international law. It also examines whether legal culture and other phenomena can justify Russia's interaction in international law. Russian Discourses on International Law explains Russia's interpretation of international law thrugh the lens of both leading western scholars and contemporary western-based Russian scholars. It will be of value to international law scholars looking for a better understanding of Russia's behaviour in international legal relations, law and society, foreign policy, and domestic application of international law. Further, those in fields such as sociology, politics, pholosophy, or general graduate students, lawyers, think tanks, government departments, and specialised Russian studies programmes will find this book helpful.

Liberalism in Russia is one of the most complex, multifaced and, indeed, controversial phenomena in the history of political thought. Values and practices traditionally associated with Western liberalism—such as individual freedom, property rights, or the rule of law—have often emerged ambiguously in the Russian historical experience through different dimensions and combinations. Economic and political liberalism have often appeared disjointed, and liberal projects have been shaped by local circumstances, evolved in response to secular challenges and developed within often rapidly-changing institutional and international settings. This third volume of the Reset DOC “Russia Workshop” collects a selection of the Dimensions and Challenges of Russian Liberalism conference proceedings, providing a broad set of insights into the Russian liberal experience through a dialogue between past and present, and intellectual and empirical contextualization, involving historians, jurists, political scientists and theorists. The first part focuses on the Imperial period, analyzing the political philosophy and peculiarities of pre-revolutionary Russian liberalism, its relations with the rule of law (Pravovoe Gosudarstvo), and its institutionalization within the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets). The second part focuses on Soviet times, when liberal undercurrents emerged under the surface of the official Marxist-Leninist ideology. After Stalin’s death, the “thaw intelligentsia” of Soviet dissidents and human rights defenders represented a new liberal dimension in late Soviet history, while the reforms of Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” became a substitute for liberalism in the final decade of the USSR.  The third part focuses on the “time of troubles” under the Yeltsin presidency, and assesses the impact of liberal values and ethics, the bureaucratic difficulties in adapting to change, and the paradoxes of liberal reforms during the transition to post-Soviet Russia. Despite Russian liberals having begun to draw lessons from previous failures, their project was severely challenged by the rise of Vladimir Putin. Hence, the fourth part focuses on the 2000s, when the liberal alternative in Russian politics confronted the ascendance of Putin, surviving in parts of Russian culture and in the mindset of technocrats and “system liberals”. Today, however, the Russian liberal project faces the limits of reform cycles of public administration, suffers from a lack of federalist attitude in politics and is externally challenged from an illiberal world order. All this asks us to consider: what is the likelihood of a “reboot” of Russian liberalism?

This volume is based on the premise that moral claims made about sports mega-events

constitute one of the most visible and significant sources of normative expectations about

international affairs. Thanks to sport’s extraordinary popularity, what we expect of international

sport helps shape what we expect of the international order. Few events, if any, draw the level of

global attention that the Olympic Games and the men's soccer World Cup excite. In 2012, an

estimated 70% of the world’s population participated in some way in the Olympic Games;

figures for the 2010 men’s soccer World Cup show close to half the world’s population watching

at least some of the coverage.1 These events do not simply offer a representation of a global

order; they create, reinforce, and propagate normative views about that global order, helping to

constitute the moral rules and expectations that guide and inspire it.

The volume traces the origins and development of international sport’s major idealistic

claims and examines how they have operated in particular contexts. Chapters investigate the

functions idealistic claims have served, what kind of politics they have abetted, and why they

have been believable, when, and to whom. It aims to understand how different ideals have

worked sometimes in tension and sometimes in harmony and how the relative power of each

ideal has waxed and waned as a result of changes in international politics. The contributions

probe contestation over ideals by organizers, proponents, and critics; the legitimizing strategies

that have underpinned those claims; the relationship of these claims to broader currents of

international idealism; and how these claims have influenced conceptions of world order.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of public opinion patterns among Muslims, particularly in the Arab world. On the basis of data from the World Values Survey, the Arab Barometer Project and the Arab Opinion Index, it compares the dynamics of Muslim opinion structures with global publics and arrives at social scientific predictions of value changes in the region. Using country factor scores from a variety of surveys, it also develops composite indices of support for democracy and a liberal society on a global level and in the Muslim world, and analyzes a multivariate model of opinion structures in the Arab world, based on over 40 variables from 12 countries in the Arab League and covering 67% of the total population of the Arab countries. While being optimistic about the general, long-term trend towards democracy and the resilience of Arab and Muslim civil society to Islamism, the book also highlights anti-Semitic trends in the region and discusses them in the larger context of xenophobia in traditional societies. In light of the current global confrontation with radical Islamism, this book provides vital material for policy planners, academics and think tanks alike.

This work serves as a comprehensive collection of global scholarship regarding the vast fields of public administration and public policy. Written and edited by leading international scholars and practitioners, this exhaustive resource covers all areas of the twin fields of study. In keeping with the multidisciplinary spirit of these fields, the entries make use of various theoretical, empirical, analytical, practical, and methodological bases of knowledge.

The encyclopedia provides a snapshot of the most current research in public administration and public policy, covering such important areas as:

1. organization theory, behavior, change and development

2. administrative theory and practice

3. bureaucracy

4. public budgeting and financial management

5. public finance and public management

6. public personnel and labor-management relations

7. crisis and emergency management

8. institutional theory and public administration

9. law and regulations

10. ethics and accountability  

Relevant to professionals, experts, scholars, general readers, and students worldwide, this work will serve as the most viable global reference source for those looking for an introduction to the field.​

A meeting in Berlin in January 2020 dedicated to a settlement in Libya — unlike the failed international conference held in Palermo in 2018 — leaves a slight hope for the implementation of conditions laid out in its final document. The essence of the proposals is to fix the state of things established in Libya at the end of last year. The meeting in Istanbul between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan that preceded the negotiations in Berlin implied the same thing. Their joint statement after the talks on January 8, 2020, stressed the impossibility of a unilateral solution to the Libyan problem: “Seeking a military solution to the ongoing conflict in Libya only causes further suffering and deepens the divisions among Libyans.”

This article addresses the puzzle of electoral engineering in autocracies using data from three rounds of Russian regional legislative elections between 2003 and 2017. The analysis shows that electoral engineering was widespread in regions where governors lacked the resources necessary to rely on blatant forms of electoral malpractice for the benefit of United Russia. This pattern became evident during the third round of regional legislative elections. The study indicates that the manipulation of electoral systems may be important for authoritarian rulers when they are unable to rely on blatant electoral malpractice to ensure the certainty of electoral outcomes.

Full Abstract

Russian migrant communities in Europe, as well as the USSR and European states’ policies towards them, were sufficiently studied in English-, French- and Russian-language relevant scholarship. However, West and South Asia received significantly less attention, although the region served the main transit zone in this process, especially the countries such as Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and even British India. During the interwar period hundreds of thousands of migrants from Soviet Russia either passed through these Southern regions towards Europe and the United States or founded their migrant communities there. These migrants became an integral part of political activism professed by Russian émigré communities all over the world in the 1920s-30s. This quite often resulted in them being manipulated on a massive scale by other governments in their foreign policies toward Soviet Russia, especially by Britain – Russia’s traditional rival in the region. On the other hand, the positions of the Soviet government in political and military terms toward its southern neighbours were significantly stronger than those in Europe. Having an upper hand in its relations with these states, the Soviet government would resort to military invasions, large-scale intelligence operations, the massive bribing of local police and the military, particularly in the border areas, as well as to imposing inter-state border-control treaties, − all this done with the aim to neutralise the anti-Soviet émigré activities and to physically liquidate their active representatives abroad as well as to conduce to the repatriation of larger numbers for subsequent prosecution on the Soviet territory.

Methodologically drawing on the most recent works in Migration Studies, in general, and in Russian Emigré Studies, in particular, the current research studies migration from the USSR into the neighbouring countries of West and South Asia – one of the most strategically important regions in the twentieth century. Within the timeframe 1917-1930, research looks into the phenomena, such as displaced statehood, political activism and cross-cultural interaction in the context of the migration policies of the relevant states (Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Britain and the USSR). The primary-source base of this research consists of mostly untapped documents from British, Russian, French, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Iranian archives and the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, collections as well as memoirs and private correspondence of migrants themselves. While highlighting some commonalities, the paper argues that the situation of Russian migrant communities in West and South Asia diametrically differed from the one in Western Europe, and puts forward a detailed analysis of the causes, developments and outcomes of this phenomenon.

Empirical studies in democracies have revealed some degree of causal relationship between public opinion and foreign policy. A look at the relationship between the evolution of Russian foreign policy priorities, as evidenced in the Foreign Policy Concepts (2000, 2008, 2013 and 2016), and public opinion regarding foreign policy measured from 1997 to 2018 shows significant shifts in perceptions of the nation’s international image. The amity/enmity feelings towards others can be explained as responses to key international events, endorsing the thesis of a rational and reactive public. Overall, public opinion and the official policy line in Russia move in the same direction.

This study analyzes roll call voting in the Council of Ministers from December 2003 to May 2019 in order to identify the factors that determine the strategies of coalition behavior of 28 EU Member States. The analysis makes possible to single out two important cleavages affecting the coalitional preferences of the Ministers of states. The first cleavage is observed between the EU members from Eastern and Western Europe. The second cleavage is associated with the duration of the countries’ EU membership. The rationalistic intentions of member countries related to the agenda of the Council and their ideological preferences also influence the process of coalition formation and allow the EU states to go beyond the geographic and ‘temporal’ cleavages.

Russia-China relations are a major focus of studies in international relations, yet few studies have thus far addressed perceptions of China among the Russian population, and perceptions of Russia among the Chinese population. This study seeks to contribute to closing this gap by focusing on country perceptions among college-age millennials. We focus on those who are involved in studies of Russia in the case of Chinese students, and studies of China in the case of Russian students; among them we have selected students who have had study abroad experience in the other country. Our findings are based on an analysis of 150 in-depth qualitative narrative interviews conducted with Chinese students and Russian students (75 with each group). We show that ethnocentric stereotypes prevail and each group engages in cultural ‘othering,’ that students from both countries perceive Russian President Vladimir Putin to be a central determining factor in shaping Russia-China relations.

Which reaction takes the upper hand: a “rally around the flag,” born of geopolitical success, or grievance over economic misfortune? By means of a survey experiment, we aim to explore the mechanisms of blame and credit when a rally around the flag coincides with a major economic downturn, and we estimate the effects of the Crimean events and the economic crisis on how Russians assess the performance of federal political institutions. Our findings suggest that economic hardships are attributed exclusively to the government and the State Duma, while it is only the president who benefits from the rally around the flag. Moreover, the president receives an additional benefit when the “patriotic unity” priming meets the “economic hardship” priming, thereby resulting in a double rally around the flag effect. This suggests that the president stands apart from state institutions when responsibility is assigned, and he is the only one to enjoy national consolidation around him, which is further reinforced by poor economic conditions. Spotlighting the president increases his popularity and consequently increases the costs of political divides, while the legislature and the government can be exploited as scapegoats for policy failures.

The article analyzes relative deprivation as a possible factor of sociopolitical instability during the Arab Spring events using the methods of correlation and multiple regression analysis. In this case, relative deprivation is operationalized in two ways: (a) through the indicator of subjective feeling of happiness on the eve of the events of the Arab Spring, and (b) through the scale of decrease of the subjective feeling of happiness on the eve of the events of Arab Spring. It is shown that the change in the level of subjective feeling of happiness between 2009 and 2010 is a powerful, statistically significant predictor of the level of destabilization in Arab countries in 2011. The next most powerful predictor is the mean value of the subjective feeling of happiness in the corresponding country for 2010. At the same time, the fundamental economic indicators we tested, while controlling for them, have turned out to be extremely weak and at the same time statistically insignificant predictors of the level of sociopolitical instability in the Arab countries in 2011.

On June 29, 2019, the Russian president Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo met for the 26th time, this time at the G20 summit in Osaka. The long-standing territorial dispute between Russia and Japan continues to be an issue, but the dialogue revealed a few interesting trends. Abe emphasised “strategic importance” of strengthening relations with Moscow in political and economic sphere as well as that of joint projects on the disputed isles, which could eventually help facilitate the conclusion of a peace treaty. Putin also stressed the significance of bilateral documents signed during his visit to Japan. He asserted that expanding partnership and strategic communication, bilateral trade and investment cooperation would bring Russian-Japanese relations to a qualitatively new level. In this atmosphere, it would be possible to ‘find a compromise on the most difficult matters.’ It appears that both parties are delaying the territorial dispute resolution in the hope that building a firm partnership could help solve the problem.

Unlike in the 1990s and early 2000s, nowadays scholars rarely address the issue of international activity of Russian regions (phenomenon known as paradiplomacy). Due to the successful centralization efforts, Russian governors almost lost their domestic as well as external agency. However, there is still a considerable variation in the levels of their international activity which remains unexplained. Employing an original dataset on the international activity of Russian governors from 2005 to 2015 I investigate the effect local political regime, ethnicity and other factors have on the level of gubernatorial participation in paradiplomacy. Contrary to other studies I find that ethnicity has a positive effect on the external activity. I argue that paradiplomacy of republics serves as a tool of their ethnic policy. I also find that more democratic local political regimes bolster the willingness of the governors to participate in paradiplomacy. Varyag governors with no prior connections to the region are also more active internationally.

The paper examines collective memory of British and Russian youth. The authors use the results of surveys conducted among Russian and British students. They focus primarily on the structure of pride in the collective memory of young people. They propose to analyze the category of pride among young people across several dimensions. First, they look at the qualitative content of national pride: pride in the realization of tasks relating to “soft power” (for example, culture, education, sports), and pride in manifestations of “hard power” (for example, pride in military victories or power politics). Second, they analyze the temporal localization of national pride: were are the main events, personalities, and phenomena study participants take pride in, both in the past and in the present. Third, an important element of understanding pride in a country is the relationship of pride to shame. In this paper, two types of national cultures are identified: a culture where pride prevails over shape (we call this “culture of pride”), and cultures where shame prevails (“culture of shame”).

The 1980 Olympiad in Moscow (the first Olympiad in Eastern Europe and the socialist  state) is viewed through the prism of the successes and failures of the cultural and sports diplomacy of the Soviet state. Olympics-80 as a kind of mega-project "developed socialism" promoted (albeit temporarily) not only to strengthening the position of the Soviet Union in the international arena (especially in the background of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), but also unity of Soviet citizens in the face of "Western threat". The situation was somewhat more complicated with attempts to use the Olympic project to strengthen the socialist camp.  The source base of the research was the materials of the State archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian state archive of socio-political history and the Central archive of Moscow, as well as the published documents of the Russian state archive of modern history.  It is shown that, despite the boycott of the Olympics, its consequences did not have a particularly strong impact on the development of sports ties and international tourism in the USSR. For example, in 1980, at the suggestion of the delegation of the USSR, the participants of the world conference on tourism, when adopting the Manila Declaration on world tourism, included in the Declaration all the initiatives of the Soviet delegation. And since 1982, the process of restoring international sports contacts began. 

  PublicationReportTitleThe Tip of the Iceberg : Prop. 1975:26 and its Freedom of Choice Goal in Sweden’s Multiculturalism PolicyAuthorTawat, MahamaEditorHellström, AndersDate2019English abstractIn the expansive literature on Swedish multiculturalism policy, the Freedom of Choice Goal (FCG) of the Bill, Prop. 1975:26, Guidelines for an Immigrant and Minority Policy is often presented as its founding document. But this belies the fact that the Goal was beset by a controversy about its multicultural scope in the years that followed its adoption in 1975 that was never really settled. This article revisits the question and shows that the Goal indeed represented a multicultural vision. However, it was just the tip of an iceberg formed by socioeconomic integration policies. Earlier and more consistent multicultural policy provisions were present most notably in the state cultural policy. The article draws evidence from multiple sources including comparison with Norway.

The crisis in relations with the West and the subsequent sanctions hampered the development of Moscow’s cooperation with a number of foreign partners. Under these conditions, the role of the EAEU as an agent for promoting Russia's foreign trade interests has dramatically increased, including the formation of Greater Eurasian Partnership, Moscow’s flagship initiative. Russia’s officials have repeatedly stressed that ASEAN is one of the major pillars of the emerging geostrategic space. The 3rd ASEAN-Russian Federation Summit on Strategic Partnership held in Singapore in November 2018 resulted in signing of Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between ASEAN and Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) on Economic Cooperation which aims to unlock the potential of cooperation between two integration blocks. The paper addresses the following question – to what extent can RussiaASEAN strategic partnership create a positive spillover effect on the EAEU-ASEAN ties and trigger the Greater Eurasian Partnership concept. In doing so, the paper focuses on factors which stand behind ASEAN’s rising interest in Eurasian space, EAEU’s strive to develop relationships with Association and the limits of bilateral cooperation in a broader Greater Eurasian framework. It is concluded that the full engagement of ASEAN member states into Eurasian initiatives (even taking into account their successful implementation) depends on several factors. Firstly, to what extent EAEU member states can eliminate structural problems - institutional imbalances, limited export supplies, internal disagreements between the participants. Secondly, it will depend on whether Russia and ASEAN will be able to back up the status of strategic partnership with economic projects. Finally, will the EAEU partners be able to offer ASEAN an attractive interaction format, for example, the Great Eurasian Partnership, which needs to be conceptually filled and linked with ASEAN key initiatives and plans.

Correct aggregation of individual preferences into collective one is central problem of nowadays Social Choice theory. After the Arrow’s and Gibbard–Satterthwaite impossibility theorems it became clear that our desire to justify an electoral procedure is doomed to failure. At the same time a lot of scholars continued exploring different properties of existing voting rules and constructing the new ones. Contemporary research in this area explore two main properties of aggregation procedures — their degree of manipulability and computational complexity of manipulation. Quantitative evaluations of these properties tend to be main criteria of voting procedure selection. But last decades it turned out that another threat for theory of voting is incompatibilities and unexpected outcomes of different kind, usually called paradoxes. This article provides complete systematization of voting paradoxes known for today. We also presented an attempt to formulate a complete proof of the (in)stability of seven most common used voting rules to paradoxes of any type, which had not been undertaken before. Our results show that different voting procedures are qualitatively different in the sense of vulnerability to voting paradoxes which makes reasonable to propose additional criteria of voting procedure selection and opens the gate for further quantitative research.

This article discusses the structural elements of the concept of a security community using the example of ASEAN. The relevance of studying this phenomenon has risen dramatically due to the official launch of the ASEAN Community in 2015, which consists of three key elements – the Economic Community, the Political and Security Community and the Socio-Cultural Community. The article argues that such generally accepted factors as economic interdependence, the political regimes, and the support of liberal ideas should be considered only as triggers which may facilitate the transition of security communities to a more advanced stage. In this regard, more significant variables are the “we feeling” among ruling elites and the population, the presence of common goals, the interests and values shared by all members of the community, adherence to key norms and principles of functioning of the union, the presence of strong channels of communication between states, the ability of collective response of states to internal and external challenges, and peaceful conflict resolution.

This study investigates the involvement of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in the development of the common foreign and security policy (CFSP) after the Treaty of Lisbon. The preliminary results reveal that the competence of the CJEU in CFSP is limited because EU member states (MS) avoid extending the principle of direct effect and other acquis of the CJEU in this field. On the basis of the integration through law concept it has been demonstrated that the CJEU (in the realm of rulings as provided by the Treaties) can rule in a way that would almost certainly have an impact on how CFSP is being implemented. This paper provides a reconstruction of the case law in the field and the prospects for integration through legal development.

Previous studies have found that the increase in the proportion of youth in adult population can lead to an increased risk of political violence. However, studies of the influence of the ‘youth bulges’ on the intensity of non-violent protest activity have hardly been conducted. We hypothesize that ‘youth bulges’ could influence the rise of non-violent protests as well. We find that though in the absence of controls, there is a statistically significant negative correlation between the proportion of young people in the total adult population and the intensity of non-violent protests this correlation turns out to be positive after the introduction of controls for per capita GDP, urbanization, non-autocratic political regime and the proliferation of education. 

Political Internet meme is an underresearched contemporary phenomenon situated at the interface of digital media and political communication. Regarded as a unit of online transmission of cultural information, such a meme can be considered, on the on hand, as a manifestation of post-folklore, and on the other hand, as a mechanism of political participation and construction of social media users’ collective identity. The article presents the results of investigation into Internet memes generated by protest discourse in Runet (Russian Internet). Examination of a vast amount of Internet content allows drawing conclusions as to the thematic emphases of protest actions represented in Runet’s memosphere and to the specifics of the image of Russian protest as reflected in memes.

The article investigates the questions how and why, the European mainstream responds to the challenge of the right-wing populist parties (RPP), by analyzing the UK case. Using a mixed methodological approach, which includes the theoretical tools of historical institutionalism, Down’s classification of the mainstream’s strategies and Heinze's approach to analyzing the factors of its choice, we survey the strategic responses of the UK political mainstream (Conservatives and Labour), towards RPP (UK Independence Party). Findings suggest that the political mainstream could move from exclusion strategies, to predominantly inclusion strategies. In the UK case – cooptation of UKIP’s policy positions with political and legal isolation. Transit to these strategies takes place under the influence of the electoral and ideological development of UKIP, the salience of migration issues, strategies of other mainstream parties and the historical conditions that define available options and shape the selection process, in the UK – party-based Euroscepticism.

Based on the idea of the analysis of symbolic representations of sovereignty and framework of poststructuralist international relations theory this research is exploring the performative nature of sovereignty in a comparative empirical perspective. We have taken four well-known speeches on sovereignty issues to see which symbolic representations of sovereignty were involved in the specific discourse of the four presidents: France, the United States of America, Russia and China. In the analyzed symbolic representations of sovereignty, we encounter important differences synthesize ten symbolic representations of sovereignty that are common to all four examined discourses.

The study analyzes the construction of the network links of Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny with various issues of Russian public discussion in the national print media. The theoretical framework is issue ownership theory, according to which political actors have a range of issues that are most strongly associated with them. Ownership by the politician of topics that are perceived as important in the society determines his popularity among the population. In this study, we use the Integrum database, which contains extensive print media archives of approximately 500 Russian magazines and more than 250 national newspapers. We analyze the period from 12.12.2016 to 12.12.2017, i.е., one year after Alexey Navalny's announcement of his intention to participate in the presidential election in 2018. The analysis shows that Putin has more opportunities to form an agenda, as he attracts much more attention from national media than Navalny does. Putin is often mentioned in connection with economic issues and international relations, which attract the attention of the population and are perceived as important, while his activity in these spheres is perceived as successful. Navalny is associated with the issues of corruption, NGOs and civic activism. Corruption is an important topic for Russians, but the low attention of the media to Navalny does not allow him to gain the maximum benefit from owning this story.

This research analyzes the differences between municipal elections in large and medium-sized Russian cities (more than 100,000 citizens) and federal elections to representative bodies for the period from 2003 to 2018. The empirical evidence includes 210 municipal electoral campaigns in 119 cities and 4 federal legislative campaigns for comparison. We examine these differences using the notion of the party system nationalization, which is measured by comparing turnout and voting for political parties at different territorial levels in the same cities, and by party system inflation (with the use of the effective number of parties – an index that allows a comparison of election competitiveness at different administrative levels). Most of the cases are midterm municipal elections held separately between the federal campaigns. However, we draw special attention to the differences when federal and municipal campaigns overlap. The results showed some progress in the process of the nationalization of the Russian party system which is indicated by the rapprochement of the degree of competitiveness in the federal and municipal elections and, later, by the likeliness of electoral preferences at different territorial levels.

Nordic countries are among the main destinations for immigrants in the world because of their traditionally generous policies. They are also some of the most integrated and similar countries. Yet, in the 1970s when they became confronted with the “multicultural question”, they made different choices. This article shows that the presence or absence of a sizeable immigration was the main causal factor. It explains why Sweden adopted multiculturalism while Finland and Iceland did not. However, this factor was sufficient and not necessary. The formulation of multicultural policy provisions (MCPs) in Norway despite a small and late labour immigration was the result of diffusion from Sweden. In Denmark, the absence of sizeable immigration combined with the presence of a nationally-oriented policy legacy to further deny such outcome. There was an upward albeit slow convergence towards multiculturalism. Groupings of multiculturalist and assimilationist countries stuck together until the civic turn in the mid-2000s.

Democracy has not always accompanied market economy. But in modern societies, economic and political freedoms are increasingly interconnected. Democracy and market economy can support each other. This is particularly true in post-communist economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Thus, authoritarian tendencies observed in these and other regions can negatively affect quality of economic policy and governance.

There is an extensive body of research devoted to how political satire affects political knowledge and political behavior. Extant studies are focused on political satire in democratic countries and do not pay enough attention to authoritarian regimes. This study extends this research to non- democratic regimes, while also adding to it by exploring the extent to which the use of political satire encourages exposure to political information. We conduct an online experiment on the sample of Russian students. We borrow satirical pictures from Lentach – popular Russian socialmedia public page, whose motto is “a propaganda of common sense” as opposed to biasedpolitical messages proliferated by government-controlled media outlets. Using both frequentist and Bayesian approaches, we found that access to political information containing satirical illustrating content increases attention to the information, relative to political news reports accompanied by standard news illustrations. The findings contribute to the literature on the political entertainment and exposure to political information, as well as to research on media under authoritarianism.

The G20 and BRICS emergence in response to systemic vulnerabilities and structural changes in the world economy germinated expectations, reflections and criticisms. The G20 sought to manage the crisis, reform the international architecture and devise a new global consensus. BRICS committed to foster cooperation and policy coordination between its members and promote the international institutions reform.  Often criticized for lack of efficiency and legitimacy, G20 and BRICS consistently engage with international organizations (IOs). This engagement has the potential to promote inclusiveness and efficiency of the two institutions and global governance. The study explores the G20 and BRICS modes of engagement with the IOs testing the assumption that the they can resort to a combination of “catalyst,” “core group” and “parallel treatment” modes and their preferred choice reflects their mission and role in the system of international institutions. Acting as a catalyst they can exert influence for change in IOs through endorsement or stimulus. Engaging IOs as a core group they can impart a new direction by giving a mandate or providing the necessary political leadership. They can also create their own mechanisms in parallel with IOs.  Drawing on quantitative and qualitative analysis of G20 and BRICS documents the authors trace the dynamics and models of the G20 and BRICS engagement with IOs since their first summits.  The findings confirm G20 and BRICS commitment to multilateralism. The G20 exceeds the BRICS by the number, intensity and scope of references to IOs. It employs all three modes, engaging key partners (the IMF, the FSB, the OECD, the WB, the WTO and the ILO) mostly as a core group. With a different degree of success G20 exerts catalytic influence over its key partners. It resorts to parallel treatment sparingly. The G20 engages IOs across the full range of global governance functions.  BRICS members consistently support the G20 decisions and the UN central role in the multi-polar world. BRICS acts as a catalyst endorsing and supporting change of the UN, the IMF, the WB, the WTO, but never acts as a core group. BRICS increasingly uses its own institutions. The BRICS mostly engages IOs in deliberation and direction setting, less frequently in decision-making. BRICS own mechanisms are also involved in delivery.  Thus G20 demonstrates a strong capability for global governance development through use of IOs, while BRICS contributes to global governance development building BRICS-centered institutional system and stimulating change of the IOs.