EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book The Political and Security Implications of Regionalism in Russia

Download or read book The Political and Security Implications of Regionalism in Russia written by Allison M. Hartmann and published by . This book was released on 2001-09-01 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis examines the political and security impacts of the devolution of power to Russia's regions since 1993. By reviewing the basis of Russia's federal structure the author identifies how the nature of the structure and the manner in which it evolved have led to the emergence of local tsars who have few horizontal or vertical checks on their power. The thesis analyzes the impact that strong regional leaders have had within their regions, to include their impact on free and fair elections, free press, individuals' rights, and rule of law. The author finds that the lack of checks on the regional leaders' abuses of power within the regions destabilizes the country by only further encouraging them to expand their power into realms intended to be under the control of the federal government, to include the military and foreign policy. The resultant injection of regional leadership into these matters threatens the security of Russia by inhibiting the ability of the central government to field a cohesive military force and pursue cogent foreign policy. The thesis further examines the prospects for regional tsars in light of recent efforts to rein in the regions. The author determines that these reforms, though resulting in a degree of centralization, also target some of the key problems in Russia's federation, to include the dearth of checks on regional power and the contradictions in the legal framework guiding center-periphery relations. However, further reforms targeting Russia's antiquated federal structure and enforcement mechanisms are recommended.

Book Eurasian Integration and the Russian World

Download or read book Eurasian Integration and the Russian World written by Aliaksei Kazharski and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-10 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines Russian discourses of regionalism as a source of identity construction practices for the country's political and intellectual establishment. The overall purpose of the monograph is to demonstrate that, contrary to some assumptions, the transition trajectory of post-Soviet Russia has not been towards a liberal democratic nation state that is set to emulate Western political and normative standards. Instead, its foreign policy discourses have been constructing Russia as a supranational community which transcends Russia's current legally established borders. The study undertakes a systematic and comprehensive survey of Russian official (authorities) and semi-official (establishment affiliated think tanks) discourse for a period of seven years between 2007 and 2013. This exercise demonstrates how Russia is being constructed as a supranational entity through its discourses of cultural and economic regionalism. These discourses associate closely with the political project of Eurasian economic integration and the "Russian world" and "Russian civilization" doctrines. Both ideologies, the geoeconomic and culturalist, have gained prominence in the post-Crimean environment. The analysis tracks down how these identitary concepts crystallized in Russia's foreign policies discourses beginning from Vladimir Putin's second term in power.

Book The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism written by Tanja A. Börzel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism - the first of its kind - offers a systematic and wide-ranging survey of the scholarship on regionalism, regionalization, and regional governance. Unpacking the major debates, leading authors of the field synthesize the state of the art, provide a guide to the comparative study of regionalism, and identify future avenues of research. Twenty-seven chapters review the theoretical and empirical scholarship with regard to the emergence of regionalism, the institutional design of regional organizations and issue-specific governance, as well as the effects of regionalism and its relationship with processes of regionalization. The authors explore theories of cooperation, integration, and diffusion explaining the rise and the different forms of regionalism. The handbook also discusses the state of the art on the world regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Eurasia, Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Various chapters survey the literature on regional governance in major issue areas such as security and peace, trade and finance, environment, migration, social and gender policies, as well as democracy and human rights. Finally, the handbook engages in cross-regional comparisons with regard to institutional design, dispute settlement, identities and communities, legitimacy and democracy, as well as inter- and transregionalism.

Book Regional Disparities and Fiscal Federalism in Russia

Download or read book Regional Disparities and Fiscal Federalism in Russia written by Oksana Dynnikova and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper examines how regional disparities have evolved in Russia and how Russia’s system of intergovernmental fiscal relations is managing these disparities. Regional disparities have fallen over the past two decades but remain relatively high. Socioeconomic outcomes remain worse in lagging regions despite faster growth and convergence in income levels. The twin shocks of COVID-19 and lower oil prices appear to have impacted richer regions disproportionately. Compared to other large countries with federal systems of government, Russia stands out with its high reliance on direct taxes as a revenue source for its regions. Transfers from the federal budget to the regions provide some redistribution by reducing the dispersion in real per capita fiscal spending, but also tend to be associated with lower growth. The Russian fiscal system offers degrees of redistribution and risk sharing of around 26 and 18 percent, respectively—with in-kind social transfers contributing the most. Finally, federal transfers in the aggregate tend to be procyclical and are also fairly unresponsive to shocks to regions’ own revenues.

Book Boundary Issues in Central Asia

Download or read book Boundary Issues in Central Asia written by Necati Polat and published by Brill Nijhoff. This book was released on 2002 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To Polat (international law and politics, Middle East Technical U., Ankara, Turkey), Central Asia extends from the Caspian Sea in the west to China in the east; and from Siberian Russia in the north to Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan in the south. He combines perspectives from international law, international politics, and political geography to examine issues regarding borders between the states created by or after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Among these issues are the legal framework, the degree of contentment with existing frontiers, the legacy of Soviet border disputes with China, and transboundary bodies of water. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Book New Regionalism Or No Regionalism

Download or read book New Regionalism Or No Regionalism written by Ruxandra Ivan and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Regionalism or No Regionalism? places the Black Sea probl(r)matique in a wider historical and spatial context, taking a closer look at the region and examining further the structure of the Black Sea area. The authors offer a perspective on smaller actors with great ambitions, such as Azerbaijan and Romania, and go on to make a comparison between the emerging regionalism in the Black Sea area and regionalisms in other parts of the world."

Book Russia Abroad

    Book Details:
  • Author : Anna Ohanyan
  • Publisher : Georgetown University Press
  • Release : 2018-10-01
  • ISBN : 162616620X
  • Pages : 229 pages

Download or read book Russia Abroad written by Anna Ohanyan and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While we know a great deal about the benefits of regional integration, there is a knowledge gap when it comes to areas with weak, dysfunctional, or nonexistent regional fabric in political and economic life. Further, deliberate “un-regioning,” applied by actors external as well as internal to a region, has also gone unnoticed despite its increasingly sophisticated modern application by Russia in its peripheries. This volume helps us understand what Anna Ohanyan calls “fractured regions” and their consequences for contemporary global security. Ohanyan introduces a theory of regional fracture to explain how and why regions come apart, consolidate dysfunctional ties within the region, and foster weak states. Russia Abroad specifically examines how Russia employs regional fracture as a strategy to keep states on its periphery in Eurasia and the Middle East weak and in Russia's orbit. It argues that the level of regional maturity in Russia’s vast vicinities is an important determinant of Russian foreign policy in the emergent multipolar world order. Many of these fractured regions become global security threats because weak states are more likely to be hubs of transnational crime, havens for militants, or sites of protracted conflict. The regional fracture theory is offered as a fresh perspective about the post-American world and a way to broaden international relations scholarship on comparative regionalism.

Book Russia s Turn to the East

Download or read book Russia s Turn to the East written by Helge Blakkisrud and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-29 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is open access under a CC BY license. This book explores if and how Russian policies towards the Far East region of the country – and East Asia more broadly – have changed since the onset of the Ukraine crisis and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Following the 2014 annexation and the subsequent enactment of a sanctions regime against the country, the Kremlin has emphasized the eastern vector in its external relations. But to what extent has Russia’s 'pivot to the East' intensified or changed in nature – domestically and internationally – since the onset of the current crisis in relations with the West? Rather than taking the declared 'pivot' as a fact and exploring the consequences of it, the contributors to this volume explore whether a pivot has indeed happened or if what we see today is the continuation of longer-duration trends, concerns and ambitions.

Book Confrontational and Cooperative Regional Orders

Download or read book Confrontational and Cooperative Regional Orders written by Ariel Gonzalez Levaggi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains cooperative and confrontational regional orders in the post-Cold War era. Applying a push-and-pull framework to the evolution of regional orders, the book’s theoretical section compares regional dynamics and studies the transformation and authority of governing arrangements among key regional actors who manage security and institutional cooperation. This presents a novel approach to comparing non-Western regional orders, and helps forge a better integration between International Relations disciplinary approaches and area studies. The empirical section analyzes Central Eurasia and South America within the period 1989-2017, using case studies and interviews with decision-makers, practitioners and experts. The volume demonstrates that soft engagement strategies from extra-regional great powers and internationalist domestic coalitions framed in a stable democratic polity are forces for peaceful interaction, while hard engagement strategies from great external powers plus nationalist coalitions within democratic backsliding in key regional powers present negative outlooks for regional cooperation. This book will be of much interest to students of regional security, comparative politics, area studies and International Relations.

Book Regions and Powers

Download or read book Regions and Powers written by Barry Buzan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-12-04 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops the idea that since decolonisation, regional patterns of security have become more prominent in international politics. The authors combine an operational theory of regional security with an empirical application across the whole of the international system. Individual chapters cover Africa, the Balkans, CIS Europe, East Asia, EU Europe, the Middle East, North America, South America, and South Asia. The main focus is on the post-Cold War period, but the history of each regional security complex is traced back to its beginnings. By relating the regional dynamics of security to current debates about the global power structure, the authors unfold a distinctive interpretation of post-Cold War international security, avoiding both the extreme oversimplifications of the unipolar view, and the extreme deterritorialisations of many globalist visions of a new world disorder. Their framework brings out the radical diversity of security dynamics in different parts of the world.

Book Regionalism without Regions

    Book Details:
  • Author : Ulrich Schmid
  • Publisher : Central European University Press
  • Release : 2019-08-14
  • ISBN : 9789637326639
  • Pages : 0 pages

Download or read book Regionalism without Regions written by Ulrich Schmid and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collective volume shows how Ukraine can best be understood through its regions and how the regions must be considered against the background of the nation. The overarching objective of the book is to challenge the dominance of the nation-state paradigm in the analyses of Ukraine by illustrating the interrelationship between national and regional dynamics of change. The authors—historians, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, literary critics and linguists from Ukraine, Poland, Switzerland, Germany and the USA—explicitly go beyond the perspective of an entity defined by traditional political borders and cultural, economic, historical or religious stereotypes. The research project that led to the composition of the book combined quantitative (statistical surveys conducted across Ukraine) and qualitative (in-depth interviews and focus-group discussion) methods. The authors came to the conclusion that regionalism as a defining phenomenon of Ukraine is more prominent than the regions themselves. This approach regards Ukraine as a construct in flux where different discourses intersect, concur and eventually merge through the lenses of various disciplines and methodologies.

Book Russian Regions and Regionalism

Download or read book Russian Regions and Regionalism written by Anne Aldis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-08-29 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergence of large regions within Russia as centres of gravity for political and international power, and the changing relationship between these emerging regions and the centre are critically important factors currently at work within Russia. This book examines the whole question of Russian regions and regionalism. It considers important themes related to regionalism, including demography, security, military themes and international relations, and looks at a wide range of particular regions as case studies. It discusses the extent to which regions have succeeded in establishing themselves as centres of power, and assesses the degree to which President Putin is succeeding in incorporating regions into a hierarchy of power in which the primacy of the centre is retained.

Book The Regional World Order

Download or read book The Regional World Order written by Alexei D. Voskressenski and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the evolving post-Westphalian world regional entities become key political and economic players as the authors argue in this volume. As a result of regionalization, the international politics and economics is witnessing great transformations too. This volume explores some ideas of how these transformations may develop. It is written by three generations of researchers and scholars at European, Russian, and Asian higher education institutions. Their different perspectives are integrated in a coherent, multi-dimensional view to answer challenges facing what is called increasingly “Greater Eurasia”. The volume employs a rigorous conceptual framework over a wide geographic range and applies different approaches to ask and answer challenging questions. The arguments presented in this book are built around the concepts of regionalism and transregionalism. The volume is focusing on three different geographical entities: Europe, Eurasia and East Asia, and examines ASEM, EAEU, BRI, EU, ASEAN, CIS, as well as TTIP, TTP, OBOR .

Book Crisis and Institutional Change in Regional Integration

Download or read book Crisis and Institutional Change in Regional Integration written by Sabine Saurugger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparative regional integration has met with increasing interest over the last twenty years with the emergence or reinforcing of new regional dynamics in the EU, NAFTA, MERCOSUR and ASEAN. This volume systematically and comparatively analyses the reasons for regional integration and stalemate in European, Latin American and Asian regional integration. It examines whether regional integration systems change in crisis periods, or more precisely in periods of economic crises, and why they change in different directions. Based on a neo-institutionalist research framework and rigorously comparative research design, the individual chapters analyse why financial and economic crises lead to more or less integrated systems and which factors lead to these institutional changes. Specifically it addresses institutional change in regional integration schemes, power relations between member states and the institutions in different policy domains, and change in individual or collective citizens’ attitudes towards regional integration. Adopting an actor-centred approach, the book highlights which regional integration schemes are influenced by economic and financial crises and how to explain this. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and policy specialists in regional integration, European Politics, International Relations, and Latin American and Asian studies.

Book Regionalism and Multilateralism

Download or read book Regionalism and Multilateralism written by Thomas Meyer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-22 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the impact of cultural diversities and identities on regional and interregional cooperation, as well as on multilateralism. Employing a comparative approach to organizations such as ASEAN, MERCOSUR, SAARC, and the African and European Unions, this volume seeks to understand their distinctive features and patterns of interaction. It also explores the diffusion of multidimensional interregional relations, including but not limited to the field of trade. Scholars from several disciplines and four continents offer insights concerning the consequences of both multiple modernities and the rise of authoritarian populism for regionalism, interregionalism, and multilateralism. The Covid-19 pandemic confirmed the decline of hegemonic multilateralism. Among alternative possible scenarios for global governance, the "new multilateralism" receives special attention. This book will be of key interest to European/EU studies, economics, history, cultural studies, international relations, international political economy, security studies, and international law.

Book Global China

    Book Details:
  • Author : Tarun Chhabra
  • Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
  • Release : 2021-06-22
  • ISBN : 0815739176
  • Pages : 430 pages

Download or read book Global China written by Tarun Chhabra and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The global implications of China's rise as a global actor In 2005, a senior official in the George W. Bush administration expressed the hope that China would emerge as a “responsible stakeholder” on the world stage. A dozen years later, the Trump administration dramatically shifted course, instead calling China a “strategic competitor” whose actions routinely threaten U.S. interests. Both assessments reflected an underlying truth: China is no longer just a “rising” power. It has emerged as a truly global actor, both economically and militarily. Every day its actions affect nearly every region and every major issue, from climate change to trade, from conflict in troubled lands to competition over rules that will govern the uses of emerging technologies. To better address the implications of China's new status, both for American policy and for the broader international order, Brookings scholars conducted research over the past two years, culminating in a project: Global China: Assessing China's Growing Role in the World. The project is intended to furnish policy makers and the public with hard facts and deep insights for understanding China's regional and global ambitions. The initiative draws not only on Brookings's deep bench of China and East Asia experts, but also on the tremendous breadth of the institution's security, strategy, regional studies, technological, and economic development experts. Areas of focus include the evolution of China's domestic institutions; great power relations; the emergence of critical technologies; Asian security; China's influence in key regions beyond Asia; and China's impact on global governance and norms. Global China: Assessing China's Growing Role in the World provides the most current, broad-scope, and fact-based assessment of the implications of China's rise for the United States and the rest of the world.

Book Revisiting Regionalism and the Contemporary World Order

Download or read book Revisiting Regionalism and the Contemporary World Order written by Élise Féron and published by Verlag Barbara Budrich. This book was released on 2019-10-28 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book critically analyzes the ongoing changes in the regional, intra-regional, and global dynamics of cooperation, from a multi-disciplinary and pluralist perspective. It is based on the insight that in a post-hegemonic world the formation of regions and the process of globalization can be largely disconnected from the orbit of the US, and that a plurality of power and worldviews has replaced US hegemony. In spite of these changes, most existing analyses of current changes in the world order still rely upon Western-centered approaches, and Westphalian thinking. Against this backdrop, the book proposes to advance a truly global IR understanding of the post-hegemonic world, and weaves together the pluralist and multi-disciplinary perspectives of scholars located all around the world.