Articles

This article sets out to solve the scholarly problem of determining the place of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in current international relations and their role and relations with states. The author analyzes the concept of civil society, the starting point in the study of modern NGOs over the past 30 years, and considers by turns (1) the problems of defi ning the concepts of NGOs and civil society; and (2) the formation of these concepts in connection with the transformation of the system of international relations in the early 1990s and the policy of the Western countries in the post-Soviet space. He goes on to conclude that that civil society in the modern Western liberal reading should be considered as a historical phenomenon without any claim to universal signifi cance. The article addresses the current foreign policy practice of the United States and the European Union in working with NGOs, noting that Western states and private foundations are losing their monopoly position in the fi eld of NGOs as other states master this tool and create their own infrastructure for working with it on the domestic and foreign political circuit. The further development of the NGO sphere, the author concludes, will be aff ected by the processes of increasing interstate competition and regionalization.

The dying away of the world of the Modern in today’s Western countries and the triumph in them of postmodern principles are in fact the main source of the weakness of European civilization., generating advancing trends of Countermodernism and archaism. This variant of European civilization is demonstrating genuine powerlessness in the protection of its basic values. But that does not mean that this historical tendency should be abandoned in favor of other mythical paths of development that run counter to the Countermodern and barbarization. It only means that it is necessary to look for and off er a diff erent version of Modernism — an altermodern or a supermodern — that is able to bring new life to European civilization, fi ll it with a new reading and feeling of basic European values that can give progress a new impetus, making it strong enough to withstand not only the forceful but also the semantic challenge of the forces that have adopted post-terorism today.

The article deals with the main features of the development of state and church relations in modern Russia, discussions about the current model of state and church relations in our country. It is concluded that modern society has worked out a balance in the communication of secular and spiritual power, based on dialogue and cooperation, which is the most important guarantee of social and political stability and the provision of proper conditions for state building. It is emphasized that the established model of state and church relations in modern Russia is cooperative, within which the state and the church are treated as equal partners.

This article addresses problems of modern political demography both in a broad context and through examples of specifi c regions. The authors show how the infl uence of political decisions taken by individual countries and leading to demographic changes have provoked cascades of destructive eff ects with catastrophic long-term consequences for entire countries and regions. An example from documents of the U.S. Department of State illustrates how, under two diff erent administrations — fi rst Obama and then Trump — the attitude in the American establishment changed towards the migration problem in the United States itself. The mechanism of destabilization of the Maghreb zone, as a result of which conditions were created for a mass outmigration, is also developed. In addition, the authors off er a study of the collapse of multiculturalism using the example of the ill-considered policy of European countries in accepting migrants, which led to diffi culties in integrating them into an environment with a diff erent ethno-religious composition and sociocultural characteristics. Further, the authors draw a cautionary conclusion as to the risk of a systematic and strategic catastrophe in the long term for the whole of European society if current policies and approaches in the fi eld of demography and specifi cally migration are maintained. Finally, the article identifi es the most striking factors of migration-as-weapon, the study of which received a powerful impetus after the 2015 migration crisis in Europe. The mechanism of initiating an international crisis through the controlled direction of masses migrating to a number of EU countries to achieve short-term strategic and geopolitical goals is addressed by the authors. The success achieved using major tides of people in the form of a military-political special operation on the international level against a number of state and supranational actors, as well as the scale of the consequences, have made it possible to asses the forced and controlled exfi ltration of signifi cant masses of people as a new non-classical weapon of mass destruction. The article adds a further conclusion, asserting that the lack of control in the fi eld of migration poses serious risks to Russia’s national security.

The Battle of Stalingrad (1942–1943) is a battle that became a turning point in the Great Patriotic War, World War II and world history. Soviet troops defeated the German armies and allies of Nazi Germany and, seizing the strategic initiative, laid the foundation for the great victory of 1945. The Stalingrad victory, this “Russian military miracle,” has never ceased to amaze the world. The Battle of Stalingrad is an event of planetary, civilizational and geopolitical scale. Recently, however, it has emerged, as has the entire Second World War, at the center of a fi erce ideological information war. Valuations, results and the signifi cance of the Battle of Stalingrad have been falsifi ed. In recent years, a great number of very strange interpretations, symbols and myths about the Second World War have been aimed at the consciousness of our people. There is an obvious geopolitical order behind this, since the discrediting of our victory leads to the discrediting of Russia itself. The focus in this article falls on the current signifi cance of the Battle of Stalingrad.

This article analyzes the dynamics of the development of Catholic political doctrine. The author considers the features of its periodization and proposes to classify the key periods of the formation of the political doctrine of the Catholic Church based on its substantive evolution. Describing the specifi cs of each stage, the author demonstrates that the development of Catholic political doctrine is a consistent process of elaborating and codifying the position of the Catholic Church regarding key issues of socio-political and economic organization.

This article analyzes certain aspects of the historical consciousness of Russian youth related to the perception and use of historical analogies. The empirical basis of the study was the results of a survey conducted in September — November 2019 among students of higher educational institutions in Moscow, Kazan, Saratov and Penza (sample size — 576 people) as well as the results of a focus group adjacent to the Digoria All-Russian Forum of Young Political Scientists (Republic of North Ossetia — Alania, September 15–21, 2019). The authors demonstrate that the prevailing type of historical consciousness of students at present is “rationalempirical,” which assumes a non-critical perception of historical analogies. The features of this type were demonstrated via the example of the parallel between modern Russia and the Brezhnev-era USSR. The authors note that when faced with the need to justify this analogy, young people sense a lack of factual knowledge. This leads to a spontaneous “construction” of the past in accordance with current political attitudes of the respondents, and the communicative memory — reference to the opinions of older family members or other familiar representatives of the older generation — goes practically unused.