Massive and persistent, protests in the Republic of Belarus have taken the world by surprise and suddenly brought the country to the centre of Europe’s attention. A rigged presidential election and a violent crackdown on the opposition unleashed deep-rooted popular discontent, which had grown mostly undetected over President Alexander Lukashenko’s 26 uninterrupted years in office. […]
The cultural, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and geographical cohesion of the Caucasus with Iran is an obvious factor that engages Tehran in the issues of this region. Therefore, the Islamic Republic of Iran was one of the first countries that recognized the newly independent states of the Caucasus after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among […]
The July escalation along the Armenia-Azerbaijan border has caught many by surprise. The clashes took place some 300 km away from the line of contact between Azerbaijan and the Nagorno Karabakh Republic and were the first major escalation after the April 2018 “Velvet Revolution” in Armenia. The situation along both the line of contact and […]
The South Caucasus is not only one of the most multi-ethnic regions on Europe’s periphery but also, and probably because of this, one of the most conflict-inflicted territories in the world. Not only did the disintegration of the Soviet Union allow the three countries of the region – Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia – to recover […]
The parliamentary elections held in late July 2020 in Syria coincided with the expansion of the US Department of Treasury’s restrictive measures against the government of Bashar al-Assad. The settlement of the conflict itself is experiencing difficulties, and the economic situation in the country is only getting worse. Besides the destruction during the war, among […]
Seit einem Jahr regiert der ukrainische Präsident Wolodymyr Selenskyj mit der absoluten Mehrheit im Parlament, doch sowohl innen- als auch außenpolitisch sind im Land nur kosmetische Veränderungen zu spüren. Kurz nach seinem fulminanten Sieg bei der Präsidentschaftswahl im April 2019 erzielte das ukrainische Staatsoberhaupt Wolodymyr Selenskyj vor einem Jahr einen wohl noch wichtigeren Erfolg. Bei […]
Putin was nervous on March 10th, 2020 when presenting the main amendment about the reset of the terms count in the Duma, it was something unprecedented even for Russia and took by surprise even his supporters. It was something he had openly denied preparing to do in the past. It was clear that he was […]
The COVID-19 pandemic, which has become the largest global challenge of the current time, has had a significant impact on the post-Soviet countries. In order to understand the extent of its influence on socio-political and socio-economic processes in the CIS countries and in Georgia adequately it is necessary to estimate how the pandemic has changed […]
In order to understand how global political conflicts and social peace will look after the corona era, it is necessary to analyze how they are developing during the crisis itself. This working paper makes the argument that the existing tendencies will accelerate and endure after the crisis. The following four factors will be discussed here: […]
In recent years the identity of the European Union has come to be inextricably linked with the logic of crisis. As opposed to other polities around the globe, the EU does not just face recurring crises but seems to exist in the very element of crisis. In a way, it welcomes crises. It has turned […]
In just a few months, COVID-19 has turned our world upside down. The pandemic has claimed over 100,000 lives and untold economic damage. It is also affecting relations between states, in many cases, for the worse. These momentous events have led many to wonder what the pandemic means for the future of the international order. […]
In the past century, world order changes reflected the results of two world wars and the Cold War. The latter ushered in a period of Pax Americana – an unprecedented short era of one country’s – the United States of America’s – global dominance. This period featured a surge in globalization – a process of […]
The COVID-19 pandemic is the most disruptive global event since the Great Depression and World War 2. At least 4.8 million people have been infected in less than six months; more than 300,000 have died, and many more deaths will occur even if effective vaccines or treatments are eventually developed. The economic costs are staggering: […]
Mit der Rückkehr der Volksrepublik China als eurasischer Macht auf die weltpolitische Bühne nach 100 Jahren der Depression und einer damit einhergehenden offensichtlichen Verlagerung des globalen geopolitischen Fokus vom atlantischen in den indopazifischen Raum, werden die Karten im Spiel um die globale machtpolitische Führung neu gemischt. Die durchaus stabile bipolare Ordnung des 20. Jahrhunderts ist […]
The coronavirus crisis has demonstrated the distance between the type of world order Americans and people around the globe might like to attain and the type of world order that they actually have. This is a common feature of great global crises—they illuminate the gap between what is desirable and what actually exists. The current […]
