Global Political Space Research Articles

TRANSREGIONAL PARTNERSHIP OF BRICS IN RUSSIAN STUDIES

This article reviews the literature dealings with the problems of the BRICS, summarized the issues raised by various authors on the main trends in the development of the community and this organization in generally in light of the global economic and political processes. Issues theoretical aspects of further development of the organization as one of the vectors of the global redistribution of the globally weight. This research consistently served all major aspects, related to the functioning of the features of the BRICS as an innovative format of the informal inter-regional cooperation between the countries. So far as the BRIXis a relatively "young"association, its institutionalization is a currently ongoing. This is the primarily due to the economic aspect: the creation of the New Development Bank completes the first stage of the creation BRICS how the formalized association. In contrast to the economic component, around which, most likely, will build further cooperation, political institutionalization seems a distant prospect. At least, included in the Community countries are very different politically and are in completely different conditions in the international political arena. Perhaps in the future the BRICS will move purely in the economic vector. The paradox of this situation lies in the fact that the country's economic data are also very different. Their "weight" in the world economy has a rather significant that carries a precondition for the emergence of some of the dominant structure in the BRICS format. In this aspect, it all depends on future market component of the external and internal environment of each country. Under their influence will be shaped and altered their economies and unexpected moments can occur in a turbulent global economic space. Russian authors studied in detail the characteristics of each of the member countries of BRICS, which allows to mark a significant interest in the national science to the study of inter-regional cooperation in the global political and economic space. At the same time, the study of bibliography dedicated to the problems of the BRICS, cannot be accommodated of the entire volume of literature because there are large numbers of their, so the focus is on the main issues raised by various researchers. Disclosed issues of mutually beneficial cooperation of the participating countries in the format of this organization.

Theoretical Aspects of the Study of Problems of BRICS Countries Cooperation

The article deals with the problems and prospects of mutual cooperation between the countries-members of BRICS in the light of contemporary processes of globalization and the restructuring of the global political and economic system. It stresses the possibility to develop BRICS as the transregional association of regional leaders based on international theory of interdependence and on a concept of multi-factor equilibrium (prof. Alexei D. Voskressenski). BRICS can be seen as an interconnected system of asymmetric interactions within global political and economic space. Presented theoretical approach may help to analyze both positive and problematic aspects of the current situation in the relations between the fi ve countries.

Complementary Factors of Formation of Electoral Activity in the Territorial Political System of Portugal

The article continues a comparative study on the determination of the cycles of evolution of electoral and geographic space in the countries of developed democracy. The cycle of evolution is expressed by the changing models of complementary activity of voters and depends on the form of government, party and electoral systems, etc. The subject of research is the electoral activity of the population of Portugal after 1975, by the country and by territorial districts, along with the circumstances that affect its level. It is established that in Portugal, list-number of voters is a factor having a downward effect on the index of electoral activity. In this country the list-number of voters greatly exceeds demo-migratory proportion. This circumstance is conditional upon the sustainable interests of territories, that does not permit reducing the number of elected representatives of those territories in the framework of a constitutional maximal number of members of Parliament and one-tier system of converting a list-number of voters in seats in elected bodies. At the regional level under the organization of national elections the principle of territorial representation dominates. The second feature of the country is that demographically unreasonable increase in the list-number of voters in Portugal is correlated with administrative-political interests of the regions and with their sizes. Historically feature of Portugal as a territorial unit of a global political space is the so-called “diaspora expansion.” Activity in the elections showed that the political preferences of external electors are represented in Parliament weightier than the preferences of the residents inside the country. Inside the country the trend “the more populous district, the higher the turnout” emerges with time. The Portuguese model of complementary activity does not reflect the interparty transitions of power. Before the reform of 1991 the chaotic interweaving of mutually reinforcing factors took place. After 1991, there is a stable dominance of the group of middle regions. The specific trend of complementary activity of regions indicates the completion of the two-disc cyclicity of the evolution of electoral and geographical space.

Unifying the Ancestral Land: The CCP's “Taiwan” Frames

AbstractThe Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government engages in a vast range of measures aimed at moulding global and domestic public opinion on the Taiwan issue. The Taiwan frames set by the CCP are not just aimed at shaping domestic Chinese public opinion and global discourse on Taiwan-related matters; they also succeed in curtailing the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan's global political and commercial space. The CCP's Taiwan frames are in direct conflict with the evolving “Taiwanese identity” frames coming out of the ROC. Moreover, they form part of the CCP government's wider ideological project to frame global concepts of “Chineseness,” which is aimed at combating other ideological challenges to that trope such as the Falun Gong movement, Tibetan independence activism and Chinese democracy groups. Yet, political, economic and technological changes in the PRC and globally suggest that, despite the CCP government's increased efforts, it may be harder than ever to ensure that the CCP frames have the desired effect.

ТНК: гражданско-политический контроль в условиях денационализации

Modern transnational corporations go to the level of political subjectivity that allows them to enter into equal relationships with governmental institutions and, in many cases, even to dominate them. This process develops simultaneously both at the national and international levels. Under such circumstances, the structures of the civil society are increasingly offered as a universal regulator of the TNCs. The main advantages of these structures which are that they are not as tightly linked to the principle of territorial jurisdiction and can operate in the global political space not less freely than the TNCs themselves.

Making geopolitics otherwise: artistic interventions in global political space

This article considers how contemporary artists have have engaged with processes of militarization and governmentalization since 11 September 2001. It signals three areas of critical thematic interest where contemporary art intersects with contemporary geopolitics – questions of the body, of technology and of ‘things out of place’– and suggests that, while its practices and effects require careful critical attention, contemporary art is a field in which it is possible to reflect on how geopolitics might be enacted differently.

Power and the Politics of Global Governance

Power in Global Governance. Edited by Michael Barnett, Raymond Duvall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 390 pp., $75.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-84024-4), $29.99 paper (ISBN: 0-521-54952-3). The end of the Cold War elicited a variety of responses within the field of international relations. Whereas some scholars suggested that we would soon be nostalgic for the stability of the Cold War (Mearsheimer 1990), others (Hewson and Sinclair 1999) pointed to the importance of global governance (that is, the management of global political and economic space in the absence of a global state) as an increasingly important object of inquiry. What the latter scholars in particular have largely avoided, according to Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, is an explicit theorization of power. The failure to adequately conceptualize power, moreover, has had important consequences for our understanding of global governance. It is precisely this gap that Barnett and Duvall's Power in Global Governance seeks to fill. In the introductory chapter to Power in Global Governance , Barnett and Duvall assert that the lack of attention to power is principally the result of the field's reliance on realism's conceptualization of power. Arguing that Robert Dahl's (1957) idea of “power over” (in which A compels B to do what B would not otherwise have done) is only one form of power, Barnett and Duvall offer a taxonomy that opens up what has to date been an impoverished analytics of power. They suggest that, in addition to Dahl's familiar “compulsory power,” three other types of power warrant the attention of scholars: institutional, structural, and productive power. Institutional power is demonstrated when states design institutions of global governance to their benefit. Structural power can be identified in structural relationships such as capital and labor (think Marx). Productive power is concerned with the production of subjectivities (think Foucault). Even though Barnett and Duvall's sophisticated and quite complex taxonomy of power makes it clear why …

Is Democracy Possible, Part Ii: Cosmopolitan Ideas and the Problem of Global Political Community

A decade or so ago, John Burnheim wrote a monograph with the title Is Democracy Possible? in which he argued in favor of Athenian institutional forms at the global scale. While persuasive in its institutional reasoning, he glossed over several aporias of democratic poltiical theory that are now increasingly exposed by globalization. In this paper, I examine some of the aporias of mainstream democratic theory in terms of the options proposed by cosmopolitan democracy, but with the intent of exploring the site of global political community that the latter seems to presuppose. I examine how liberal democratic theory within the nation state tries to defend itself from the apparent cosmopolitan threat; I then explore some of the significant challenges to cosmopolitan democracy. In an Appendix, I attempt an exercise in utopistics, and provide a narrative of an imagined global political space, mainly with a view to enlarging the discussion on rethinking the political project beyond the nation-state through an act of creative story-building.

What Is the Polity?

The sovereign state became the dominant political form in a relatively brief period that began in Westphalian Europe and continued with European colonization. Contemporary states face increased challenges from inside and outside, and a global crisis of authority looms. Although the state as a form is highly variable and not about to disappear, a growing number and variety of other polities are moving toward center stage. The initiators of this roundtable asked several distinguished social scientists interested in historical perspective how they might redraw the map of global political space to reflect better current polities, boundaries, and identities and what future changes in that map they might foresee. Each contributor approached the questions in distinctive ways. Robert A. Denemark argues for more attention to world system history. Hendrik Spruyt looks for historical sociological insights into international systems change. Barry Buzan and Richard Little predict a rapidly shifting world of postmodern states and a different zone of conflict. Janice Gross Stein focuses on the privatization of security. Michael Mann finds that states as ‘polymorphous’ entities still have a future. Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach close with a discussion of their “polities” model.

Elusive Paradise: The Promise and Peril of Global Civil Society

The field of international relations has become turbulent,1 at least as measured by the proliferation of post-Cold War, perhaps post-Westphalian, reimaginings of global political space. One stream of such imaginings promises the rise of a new architecture of global politics shaped by a growing worldwide consciousness. The sources and compulsions of these global visions diverge radically across a fairly wide spectrum. At the risk of simplifying, positions coalesce around the debates concerning the continuing relevance and/or desirability of the state system and the adequacy of a liberal vision of a dem/ocratic society. For most conventional scholars and in many a popularization of the issue, global democratization involves a diffusion of liberal democracy or the local initiation of liberal societies and states across the globe. Scholars have identified a Third Wave of diffusion and experimentation, fostered by and cementing a simultaneous transition to open, market economies.2 This has been popularly recorded as the end of history.3 This spread of liberal regimes promises additionally to tame the anarchy of international relations, engendering a perpetual peace in the state system.4 This form of democratic globalism is said therefore to offer the blueprint of a new doctrine for continued US leadership and active intervention in the international system.5 While this imagining embraces both the state system and liberal democracy, alternative conceptions of global possibilities depend on the announcement of a post-Westphalian world and/or a rejection of liberal capitalist conceptions.6 In many scholarly discussions,

How the West was One: Representational Politics of NATO

Contemporary discussions about the West having “won' the Cold War are framed within a conventional strategic discourse in which one political-military alliance, NATO, demonstrated its staying power and integrity in the face of its rival alliance, the Warsaw Pact. NATO's strategic practices, long the object of criticism on the part of revisionist historians and critical peace researchers, have apparently been vindicated. This paper draws upon a variety of post-realist approaches to global politics to examine NATO as a set of practices by which the West has constituted itself as a political and cultural identity. By turning our attention from the external, foreign, and defense policies of NATO and its member states to the domestic social and cultural dimensions of Western security politics, we can illuminate a side of security policy overlooked in conventional debates. NATO's success resides in having provided a network of intertextual representations for the articulation of global political space. Traditional security concerns, including the nature of the Soviet/Warsaw Pact “threat,” can thereby be seen not as existing externally out there on their own, but as circulating within a broader set of social practices. In the wake of recent developments within the Warsaw Pact and between the two alliance systems, the critical perspective outlined here enables us to analyze contemporary security issues in ways that transcend prevailing strategic discourse. Theoretically, we can see the outlines of a post-realist approach to security. For Europe, such an approach accords dignity to alternative, post-statist, post-modern security arrangements.