Moscow University Bulletin. Series 12. Political Science. 2016. 5.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 study focuses on the process by which the state actively came to rely on church practices, especially penance, and religion-oriented values in prosecuting serious felonies committed by lay people in Russia in the second half of the 18th century. This trend - strongly evidenced in legislation, official pronouncements and declarations, judicial proceedings and sentences - was conditioned by a great many factors. The spectrum of punishment for serious crimes was significantly curtailed during the age of Enlightenment: the nobility, the upper two guilds of merchants, “eminent citizens,” and members of the clerical estate were exempted from corporal punishment. In addition, a moratorium on capital punishment, secretly introduced by Elizabeth in 1741, was confirmed in these years. Addressing the topic of the humanization of criminal law promises to help scholars reinterpret such important conceptual problems as the relationship between church and state; mechanisms of social control; the role of the monarch’s personality in shaping government policy; and the compatibility, as contemporaries perceived it, between God’s commandments and state law.