Russia’s efforts to differentiate between the Islamic State and Taliban are a mistake given that both groups share a similar ideology, albeit with slight variations.
Key ideas associated with Eurasianism were developed in the 19th century. The narrative of classical Eurasianism in the 1920s was developed to explain that Western civilisation was not superior to other civilisations. Eurasia is the middle continent between other parts of Europe and Asia. There are historical, geographical, and cultural impetuses here which push nations to different forms of association. However, the dissolution of the USSR gave birth to new ideologies and political theories of Eurasianism.
The article discusses the changes in Russia’s policy towards Asia, arguing that Russia’s pivot to Asia is a reality, one that is motivated by both political and economic interests. And although that shift is not progressing as quickly as some might want and occasionally encounters difficulties, the process has definitely begun and is in all likelihood irreversible. Only a small, marginal segment of Russian society continues to dream of unity with Europe—which itself has entered a period of severe crisis.
A lot of literature has appeared in recent years on how Russia and China have come to present a common challenge to the US-led world order. But the author of the book Power Politics: How China and Russia Reshape the World, Rob de Wijk, has propounded a different theory to prove a case rather in an ominous way that the old-style power politics has never gone away from the global scene even after the end of the Cold War.
Eurasia’s preponderance in global politics is gaining because of its location, resources, as well as mosaic population having diverse ethnic backgrounds. Since the invasion by the Mongolians in the 13th century, Eurasia as a geopolitical unity, attempted by Chengiz Khan, has been the foundation for Russia’s policies towards this region, which has been a hotbed of competition among the Persian, Turkic and Russian Tsarist empires, and the British Empire also competed for influence in the region.
On December 25 of this year we will mark 25 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many in Russia and the West were optimistic about the seeming imminent integration of Russia into a Western-led liberal democratic global order. The United States, in particular, fresh off its ‘victory’ in the Cold War, could hardly restrain its triumphalism as it stood astride the world as the sole superpower.
While environmental issues attract growing interest all over the world Russia has kept aside from this trend for a long time. Its participation in international environmental cooperation has always been determined primarily by the external policy’s objectives. In Soviet times, participation in global environmental initiatives was a channel of collaboration with the West. In the 1990s, it was a means of integration into the international community and one of the major areas of cooperation with the US.
This article contributes to the rich body of literature on Russian security perceptions and analyses how Russian security thinking evolved over the last 20 years. The focus of the article is on how Russian security perspective shifted from the goal of assuring Russian security by integration and cooperation with the West to the idea of Russia’s own separate geo-economic project and the goal of reducing the country’s dependencies on the West. Security in this article is understood both as a military-political and as an economic phenomenon.
The article discusses two major trends in contemporary world politics—the disintegration of the nation-state and supranational integration—and analyses their nature, causes and significance.
