Articles

In this second part of their article the authors examine the particularities of power in the Chinese ritualistic society, it impersonalism, the mental capacity of the political community and the problems of its modernization. The article concludes that beginning in the second half of the 20th century, China sought for the first time in its history to combine adaptive-imitative and reproductive-utilitarian tradition with the realization of a subjective role, adapting and repeating the lessons of the achievements of the Soviet Union and copying the principles of economy, the turnover of political elites and standards of consumer civilization from referenced subjects of the West. Keeping the basics of Chinese identity, taking from outside and calculating mental models, the Chinese Communist Party is organizing the construction of a bourgeois society on borrowed models. In the 21st century the Chinese mentality, with its pragmatism, orientation towards material benefits, Sino-centrism and arrogance is not producing innovation and does not offer the world civilizational alternatives, creative ideas, cultural landmarks, philosophical meanings or images of a desirable future.

This article examines decentralization in its historical and political context. The main objective is to analyze the evolution of the concept in the light of changes in various institutional design forms. The emergence of the decentralized system of management in France, aimed at engaging citizens in the political process and political decision-making while expanding their political rights, led to the creation of a new form of the political organization of power. A review of the historical and geopolitical context highlights three stages in interpreting the concept of decentralization: as self-governance on the local level, as a regionalization incentive and as a multidimensional concept that includes both the encouragement of self- governance and the redistribution of powers between different levels of government in the political, administrative and financial-economic arenas.

This article considers approaches to the notion of “ethnopolitical conflict” as such have developed in scholarship outside Russia. The author addresses the content of the politicization of the ethnicity process, the complex of causes of ethno-political conflict, the dynamics of the deployment of mobilization processes and the system of resources that promotes the achievement of goals (the concept of “structure of political opportunities” advanced by Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow). There are two major factors that play the role of mobilization “constraints”: an objective time factor - ethnopolitical orientations can dominate in mass attitudes and the people's views for a short period, as a rule, mainly during the exacerbation of intergroup relations - and a subjective factor, characterizing the willingness of political elites to achieve a compromise; the active use of ethno-political rhetoric by political parties, primarily in electoral confrontation; the marginalization of ethnic elites; and the adequate and timely application of conflict confrontation resolution technologies.

In this article, the authors address the problem of countering violent extremism in the global information space. Special attention is paid to the analysis of approaches by international organizations - including the UN, the European Union, BRICS and others - to the solution of this problem. The article compares the approaches of the US and the Russian Federation to the problem of countering violent extremism online, evaluating their efficiency and prospects for the future. The authors conclude that there can be no alternative to international cooperation in countering violent extremism and terrorism in the global information space.

The article analyzes different theoretical approaches in energy security studies within the theory of political realism/neo-realism. The author notes that the modern trends in realism (offensive, defensive, neoclassical) expand the understanding of energy security from the point of view of a state’s foreign policy and have a number of advantages in assessment of common problems of the national and international security. For political realism material resources are at the same time both the purpose, and the means instrument of expansion of power of the state. Energy resources create an opportunity for a sate to expand its power, sphere of influence, to strengthen its financial and economic potential. In the article it is emphasized that representatives of neo-realism argue that the existing high dependence in world economy on oil and gas is connected with risks of violence. Armed conflicts and collisions doesn’t stop also at the local level when military aspects of energy security are determined by struggle for the rent received from export of energy resource. At the same time these modern neo-realist trends limit ours comprehension of a state behavior and behavior of other actors on the international scene.

This article presents materials from the round table “Topical Issues of the His- tory of Socio-political Doctrines and Political Textual Study” hosted by the Program on the History of Social and Political Doctrines in the Department of Political Sci- ence at Lomonosov Moscow State University on the occasion of the program's 45th anniversary. Participants discussed the specifics of the history of the relationship of socio-political doctrines and political textual study, methodological problems in the area of scholarly knowledge and the field's development as an academic discipline. The discussion was attended by K.M. Anderson, O.Yu. Boitsova, A.A. Gorokhov, A.A. Zotkin, I.A. Kozikov, N.P. Martynenko, A.V. Myrikova, S.V. Perevesentsev, B.A. Prokudin, O.E. Puchnina, A.A. Chanyshev and A.A. Shirinyants. Reports given by the speakers can be divided into several main sections: the place and role of the political textual study in the system of political science; political textual study as scholarship and an academic discipline in the Program on the History of Social and Political Doctrines; and working with texts in the framework of the course “The History of Socio-Political Thought.” The last section is presented with a historical and political science analysis of selected specific texts.

The military-political crisis as a situation in which the threat of a large-scale military conflict may arise is one of the key problem-challenges for international security in the modern world. A key role in the emergence, development and settlement of this type of problem belongs to the world powers. This article examines the position of Germany in this regard, one of the main NATO member states during the military and political crises surrounding Yugoslavia (1995, 1999), Iraq (1991,2003), Libya (2011) and Syria (2013). Analyzing these examples, the author sets out the constant factors that determined German policy during these recent periods of military and political crisis and constructs a formal model on that basis.

The article examines the Western experience changes in the boundaries between administrative-territorial entities in the two most common forms of territorial-political organization of the state - unitary and Federal. Attempt to address on the basis of a systematic analysis of the constitutional provisions related to the internal boundaries in the grid of administrative-territorial division of countries such as USA, Canada, Belgium, Brazil, Nigeria, India and other countries. The author comes to the conclusion that the global model of federalism has a special interest in the process of becoming their own forms of Federal relations between the subjects of the Russian Federation, in particular in matters of justification and changes in subnational boundaries. The article highlighted the basic principle, which all adhere to European Federal state - change of the territory and the boundaries between administrative-territorial units shall be based on the opinion or will of the popula- tion of the affected territories, and on the basis of national law. Thus, territorial change must be the result of bilateral expression.

Although economic cooperation is a priority of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), it is characterized by low efficiency. The reasons for this lie in the fact that during the establishment of the organization, defense issues received the most attention. Over time, SCO members have begun to actively cooperate in the areas of trade, transport, industry, agriculture and customs regulation. An analysis of the regulations and mechanisms of economic cooperation within the SCO suggests that the difficulties of economic cooperation are due to differences in the priorities of the member states. Russia considers the SCO above all an instrument of defense, but China regards it as a full-scale organization of which close economic cooperation is a necessary element. For this reason, it has not yet been possible to establish rela tionships in the financial and banking sectors or to establish a relationship between the SCO and alternative integration projects (the Eurasian Economic Union and the Silk Road Economic Belt). Joint efforts with these organizations and the admission of new members to the SCO will facilitate further economic cooperation.

This article is devoted to the analysis of transnational corporations (TNC) as specifi c subjects of international politics and intities capable of changing the foreign policies of both their states of residence and states of origin. The author offers two approaches to studying the infl uence of TNCs on the foreign policy of a state. Each approach depends directly on what part is assigned to corporations in the world’s political processes. The fi rst approach considers a TNC as the instrument of a state of origin’s foreign policy. In the second view a corporation is an independent actor to some extent. The author covers the principal means and mechanisms used by corporations when exposed to internal and external policies of developed and developing countries. Also offered are examples of the infl uence of corporations on the totality of foreign policies of national states and, as a consequence, on world politics. Particular attention is paid to media corporations and the phenomenon of media protection. In his conclusion the author addresses prospects for the application of categories of Western political economy, alternative to the concept of TNC in Russian political science studies.