post-Cold War Research Articles

War in Ukraine: A power play between Democracy and Authoritarianism

This article provides an analytical discussion of the crisis of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism in the context of the Russia-Ukraine War. Some of the fundamental aspects of the post-Cold War international order are addressed in this respect, including emerging powers, anti-Westernism, authoritarianism, and new threats in international relations. It is argued that the post-Cold War period brought both stability and instability to the global world order. On the one hand, the United States' victory in the ideological conflict between the East and the West led to the dominance of the Western system and its influence in the Middle East and Central Eastern European region with the call for democracy. On the other hand, the growing intervention of the US in intra-state disputes through the deployment of NATO has become a major concern to Russia and many other nations along the eastern border. This intensified anti-Western sentiment in emerging countries, with the rise of many Authoritarian governments. Many of the conflicts that the world has witnessed since the end of the Cold War are the result of such anti-Western feelings. This resulted at the beginning of a new era of war and conflict on a global scale. Russia's war in Ukraine is one of the recent examples. Russia is attempting to maintain its sphere of influence to avoid joining NATO and the West, regardless of the cost or repercussions of the war. As a result of these conflicts between great powers, several new powers emerged, resulting in a multi-polar world order. Today, it is emphasized that the ability and willingness of great powers to cooperate in addressing these dangers will determine the course of the world.

An evaluation of the USA s Africa policy since the Cold War

In this study, the African policy of the USA has been analyzed. In the bipolar world, in the competition with the Soviet Union and communist ideology, Africa was seen as a geography that should not be lost to its rivals in American foreign policy. It is observed that the interest of the USA, which became the sole power of the international system with the collapse of the Soviet Union, in Africa decreased in the first years of the post-Cold War period. However, after the terrorist attacks that took place in his country at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the effect of the energy reserves that started to be discovered in the continent and the increasing interest of the great powers such as China, the EU, India, Japan and Russia towards Africa, the USA started military operations in Africa during the Bush era. By increasing its presence, it established a separate command responsible only for the continent and became the foremost commercial partner of the continental countries. With the presidents who came to power later, the interest in Africa decreased compared to the Bush era. In the Obama and Trump eras, it is seen that the USA lost its quality of being the most important trade partner of Africa to China and the EU. Therefore, it is seen that Africa, which rose to an important position in American foreign policy in 2001-2008, decreased in the following years. In this study, it will be emphasized how the 2008 economic crisis and the desire of the USA to reduce its dependence on foreign energy made a change in the African policy of the USA. With China's increasing interest in Africa, the fact that the continent has become a competition area of great powers will be discussed.

핵의 관점에서 본 러시아-우크라이나 전쟁

When we approach Russia-Ukraine War with the perspective of nuclear competition, relentless competition, driven by typical security dilemma, to achieve nuclear superiority is found to be strongly implicated before, during, and after the war. After the post-Cold War order emerged, the U.S. attempted to gain nuclear superiority over Russia by establishing theater missile defense system across Europe. Threat perception coming from the fear of its nuclear deterrence being undermined by America’s damage limitation strategy forced Russia to modernize its nuclear forces and extend the scope of nuclear deterrence to include the possible use of nuclear weapons even against conventional attacks. While Putin raising the prospect of using nuclear weapons invaded Ukraine, the U.S. response seemed to be constrained by the fear of nuclear escalation. Russia-Ukraine War has found 1994 Budapest Memorandum to be nothing more than empty statements and has awakened the world to the reality that nuclear threats are actively being used as a tool of intimation and escalation management. As such, Russia-Ukraine War has ushered us into “New Nuclear World” characterized by (1) the nuclear paradigm shift from non-proliferation to nuclear competition, (2) retreat of nuclear arms control regime, (3) and tripolar (U.S., Russia, and China) nuclear dynamics.

ARMS RACE: GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES

The term "arms race" refers to a competition between two or more countries for military power. The term is often used in a very general sense to refer to any rise in a country's military spending or buildup by a group of nations. This build-competitive up's generally reflects an antagonistic relationship. Other fields have made use of the idea of an arms race. However, this chapter focuses solely on military armaments competitions. Arms races are discussed in this chapter, along with their causes and implications, numerous models, attempts to manage them, and a post-cold war scenario for increased arms races in the United States. Finally, there's a conclusion that discusses the future of the arms race issue and provides recommendations for how to deal with it.

An Evaluation of Climate Change as a Security Problem Through the Structure of the International System

Climate change is an international problem that adversely affects human life in many ways. Especially in the last 40 years, the increase in the frequency and severity of natural disasters in the world has brought climate change to the international agenda. With the redefinition of security threats as a result of the break in the international system with the end of the Cold War, climate change was considered as a security concern and became the subject of an international negotiation that aims to reduce its negative effects. As a security problem, climate change brings many problems with significant environmental impacts. Within this framework, when considering the climate change-security connection, a multidimensional perspective is required beyond the security perceptions of states, in other words, beyond national security. The climate change-security link requires assessing this issue through migration, energy and the Covid-19 pandemic. Within this context, the main purpose of this article is to discuss how the structure of the international system affects the emergence of climate change, which is a multidimensional issue. The main argument of this study is that climate change, which has started to be considered as a security problem especially in the post-Cold War period, is not only an environmental problem, but also has a multidimensional, multi-layered character.

Mongolia's Strategic Partnership with India: The Third Neighbour Policy and Beyond

Following the collapse of its trusted ally, the USSR, Mongolia faced significant challenges in aligning itself within the new global order. As a result, Mongolia's external and internal strategic environment compelled the nomadic nation to establish and maintain friendly relations with major powers other than China and Russia. Mongolia has since attempted to diversify its diplomatic and strategic reach in regional and international forums that had previously been overshadowed by Mongolia's previous patron, the Soviet Union. Mongolia had adopted two distinct policies, namely the ‘Good Neighbor Policy’ and the ‘Third Neighbor Policy’, which outlined Mongolia's aspirations in the post-Cold War global order. This paper will attempt to understand the changes and continuities in Mongolian foreign policy as a result of Mongolia's 'Third Neighbour Policy,' as well as to investigate the possibility of mutual cooperation between India and Mongolia. The most important aspect of this research is identifying Mongolia's relevant security issues. This study will use empirical data to examine Mongolia's security dilemma, but the analysis will be qualitative. The study's findings show that, despite its small power status, Mongolia will play an important role in North Asian great power politics due to its geostrategic location and mineral resources. Given China's dominance and Western powers' counter-dominance initiatives, this assumption is becoming true. With this in mind, India started to transform it spiritual partnership with Mongolia into a comprehensive strategic one.

Communist China’s Foreign Policy towards South Asian Region during the Cold War and Post-Cold War Era

This paper analyzes the foreign policy of Communist China towards Capitalist South Asia via analyzing the PRC’s foreign policy towards two central states of South Asia, i-e. India and Pakistan. While China is one of the oldest civilizations in the world. Traditionally, it has had good and bad relationships with the Subcontinent of India, which was later divided into two states, India and Pakistan. From the beginning, all these states (PRC, India, and Pakistan) have some territorial issues. China and Pakistan resolved these issues and have friendly relationships with each other. But India and china still have unresolved territorial issues. These territorial issues made china the important part of the politics of South Asia. The analysis of secondary data and interviews of diplomats and policymakers are used in this research. So, China is not the only factor in the politics of South Asia; the USA also has a special bond with this region. For this research, analytical and descriptive research used.

RECONFIGURATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL ORDER MODELS: CONCEPTUAL AND STRUCTURAL-SYSTEMS APPROACHES

In this article, two blocks of problems were highlighted: the definition of the categorial-ideational apparatus and the conceptual-theoretical foundations of structural-systemic research of international relations and the analysis of the evolution of international systems in the conditions of structural transformations and international order in the context of changing configuration types after the end of the Cold War. International relations in the post-Cold War period have two stages in their evolution, through the alternation of stages of cooperation and conflict, and the structure of the post-bipolar international system until the events of September 11, 2001 was uni-polycentric, later becoming polycentric.

탈식민적 식민지 연구의 원점

In the 1980s, Korea achieved economic growth and democratization. Changes in Korean society came along with the global post-Cold War era. Japanese critical intellectuals tried to interpret the changes in Korean society. Satoru Nakamura, a Marxist historian, paid attention to the development of Korea and presented a new world history statue based on semi-developed capitalism theory. Hideki Kajimura, who led the study of modern Korean historiography based on the theory of immanent development, explained Korea as peripheral capitalism that develops dependently. Until the mid-1980s, South Korean critical economist Ahn Byeong-jik adhered to the theory of colonial semi-feudal society that denied Korea’s capitalist development. In 1985, with Ahn Byeong-jik’s study in Japan, a Korea-Japan joint research was planned to explore the historical conditions of Korean economic development. Critical intellectuals from both countries put their heads together for the first time and discussed repeatedly to historicize the colonial experience. Decolonization is possible by facing and historicizing the colonial experience. Ahn Byeong-jik accepted Nakamura’s semi-developed capitalism theory in the course of his joint research. However, this joint research cannot be simplified as the origin of colonial modernization theory. The Korea-Japan joint research on the history of Korea’s modern economy can be positioned as the starting point of the colonial research that began in earnest after the 1990s in that it attempted various empirical and theoretical analyses.

Önemli Bir Dış Yardım Politikası Aracı Olarak Kültürel Diplomasi: Yunus Emre Örneği

While military power and economic sanctions played an important role in
 interstate relations during the Cold War, the concept of soft power, which consists
 of cultural, historical and universal values that countries have in the post-Cold War
 conjuncture, has begun to replace hard powers. In the last quarter of the 20th
 century, the armament and ideological warfare of the bipolar system began to lose
 its importance. These two concepts have been replaced by elements such as identity
 and culture. In this direction, countries have started to use their cultures, languages
 and values to have an impact on other countries without using hard power. This
 situation has caused powerful states in the world to reconsider their foreign policies.
 Turkey has been one of the countries that attaches importance to the concept of soft
 power and uses it effectively in foreign policy since the beginning of the 2000s.
 Especially with the 2000s, Turkey has made important changes in its foreign policy
 to keep up with this new order and has adopted an approach that includes foreign
 aid and cultural diplomacy in foreign policy. The effective use of cultural
 diplomacy in foreign policy has broken the prejudices of the receiving countries. In
 this context, cultural diplomacy has an extremely important role in making foreign
 aid more effective.

Civil Resistance from the End of the Cold War to the 21st Century: A Historical Perspective

Civil resistance made a significant contribution to the largely peaceful end of the Cold War and has become an increasingly important factor of post-Cold War international politics. This essay proposes a historical reflection of civil resistance from the end of the Cold War to the present, in relation to some crucial issues on the contemporary international scenario. Taking 1989 as the starting point, the main aim of this study is to explore the legacy of the “Long 1989” in the evolution of civil resistance. The essay focuses on three main issues: i) the rise and decline of the post-1989 liberal cycle of civil resistance in Europe; ii) the consequences of the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the emergence of a new Chinese authoritarian state capitalism; and iii) the impact of the technological and digital revolution on post-1989 civil resistance.

Dostoevsky’s View of Russian History and Assimilation of Hegel’s Concept of “Spirit”

Abstract What gave rise to this Roundtable is the invasion by the Russian Federation of the sovereign state of Ukraine. This unprovoked act on the pretext of protecting Russian national security from a nato threat (as a result of Ukraine seeking membership) has shaken the existing post-Cold War world order. The question which arose shortly after the 24 February 2022 and which is still valid is: how do we read Russian literature against the background of the daily pictures of arbitrary carnage and destruction in the Donbas region and elsewhere in Ukraine? Is this a performance of a regressive Russian history in what Hegel termed the “world-historical” process? The question is answered by looking at Dostoevsky’s assimilation of Hegel’s concept of “national spirit” and the contradictory views about Europe this yielded in Dostoevsky’s aesthetics and polemical articles. It is this split vision which characterizes the civilizational paradox of the Russian Federation’s attitude to its European neighbors.

Ideological Topography in World Politics: A Guide to the End of the Unipolar-Homogeneous Moment

AbstractThe immediate post–Cold War era was defined by the material and ideological dominance of the United States. Thirty years on, challenges to both types of dominance proliferate. What explains the systemic change currently underway? The conventional wisdom of a shift to bipolarity or multipolarity ignores the possibility of changes within unipolarity. Recent instability is better explained by the decreased dominance of liberal-democratic ideology and the re-emergence of ideological competition. Building on Raymond Aron's analysis of homogeneous and heterogeneous international systems, we propose a typology exploring the intersections of systemic distributions of power and ideological topographies. Homogeneous topographies operate on a principle of collusion, reducing uncertainty while promoting restraint, transnational society, and gatekeeping against challenger ideologies. Heterogeneous topographies follow a crisscrossing logic, raising the stakes of relations, contributing to breakdowns in norms of nonintervention, enabling subversion by splitting loyalties, and encouraging repression and the fragmentation of transnational society. Applying this framework, we reappraise the 1990s as a unipolar-homogeneous moment. The emergence of heterogeneity in the mid-2000s, with the rise of authoritarianism and transnational illiberalism, put greater pressure on US unipolarity. This work has implications for debates about US foreign policy, the stability of unipolar systems, and the consequences of systemic change.

Order without Victory: International Order Theory Before and After Liberal Hegemony

AbstractThis article contributes a step towards the consolidation of the wide-ranging intellectual history and rapidly growing literature of international order theory. It traces the development of international order theory across three eras: 1919 and the interwar era; 1945 and the Cold War era; and 1989–1991, the post-Cold War era and rise of the “liberal” order debate. Gathering this history finds that critics in contemporary debates are deploying arguments with a quasi-polemical style similar to those used by E.H. Carr and others in past international order debates. These polemical qualities, it is suggested, may likely make contemporary debates difficult to assess and persistently controversial, even after the contemporary crisis of international order has run its course in practice.

Privatizing civil society: outsourcing governance in John le Carré’s post-Cold War novels

ABSTRACT John le Carré’s post-Cold War novels investigate the effects of the disinvestment in Euro-American civil societies and the diminishing justifications for securing democracy and the ‘free world’. As privatization and outsourcing function as primary techniques of ‘good governance’ in many western nations, security studies has offered numerous analyses of this phenomenon, particularly with the privatisation of military force in light of the GWOT. By putting contributions in security studies in dialogue with le Carré’s post-Cold War novels, I argue that le Carré’s post-Cold War novels explore how outsourcing war strategies during the Cold War become essential components of statecraft and security during the neoliberal moment when economic national security dominates in the face of the loss of clear sovereign enemies and state actors. Specifically, le Carré’s post-Cold War novels dramatise critically how market-driven security works between national or international legal orders, particularly in colonial and neocolonial contexts. I conclude that le Carré’s novels reveal an important ethical function for literature in modelling speculative scenarios for reflection on intelligence, security, and transformations in sovereignty while this paradoxical reality unfolds

Bosnia and Herzegovina in John Mearsheimer’s Concepts

Starting from the analysis of the texts of the American political scientist J. Mearsheimer created during the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina, the central theme of the paper is Mearsheimer's view on the Bosnian issue. The political-administrative organization of Bosnia and Herzegovina is still a relevant topic that takes the form of a permanent political crisis. The paper presents a synthesis of Mearsherimer's conceptions immanent in the theory of offensive realism, as well as a breakdown of post-Cold War political processes which, according to the principle of causality, can be viewed as a catalyst for the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina. Understanding the current dynamics of world political movements with an emphasis on Bosnia and Herzegovina is one of the fundamental components of this work.

John le Carré’s southern turn: British intelligence and degenerative satire in post-Cold War Latin America and Africa

ABSTRACT This article argues John le Carré’s post-Cold War novels set in Latin America and Africa depart from his earlier narratives by embracing southern attitudes, by discarding his ambiguity toward British intelligence and by critiquing UK foreign relations through the literary strategies of irony and satire. This is elaborated through an evaluation of The Night Manager, The Tailor of Panama and The Mission Song. These stories highlight le Carré’s satirical approach to deny legitimacy to British interventions in the post-Cold War Global South. The conclusion explains the importance of le Carré to intelligence studies and the fact-vs.-fiction debate.

The China Factor in Africa’s Path to Liberal Democracy

Abstract This article explores whether China’s political and economic relations with African countries constitute a factor in undermining Africa’s path to liberal democracy or not. It addresses the question of why democratic values like human rights could not be sustained in some African countries. Along this line, could China’s economic influence harm the democratisation of the African continent? The argument of this article is that differing perceptions of democracy coupled with China’s entry in Africa as an alternative to the West have provided a context for several African countries to elude the liberal democratic path. The article concludes that, in providing them with economic support, China has introduced concepts of an alternative model of government to several African countries that had initially embraced liberal democracy. China’s close relations with Africa thus have been a game-changer for the post-Cold War liberal order.

Parliamentary motions under a semi-authoritarian regime: evidence from Malaysia

ABSTRACT The proliferation of regime types in the post-Cold War era suggests that the foundation of authoritarianism is highly embedded within the power structure of the ruling elites. In the context of Malaysian politics, the dominant parties constitute the exclusive power bank that projects its desired mechanism of control over the institutions within the political structure. Theoretically, the existence of a parliament signifies the presence of institutionalized democratic procedures, albeit to a varying degree, in a political system. In reality, however, parliaments under semi-authoritarian regimes simply serve the interests of the power holders. Dominant parties strategically exercise their authority to maintain control over the authoritarian regime under the guise of parliamentary democracy. Drawing from Marina Ottaway’s framework on semi-authoritarianism, this article offers two major arguments. First, the parliamentary motion is an integral feature that contours Malaysia’s semi-authoritarian regime, which palpably had led to weak institutionalization. Secondly, strategic semi-authoritarian responses to key issues raised by the opposition have proved to be a success in restricting and subverting opposition-led mobilizations and their extra-parliamentary behaviour, thus further consolidating the semi-authoritarian structure.

COUNTERINTELLIGENCE IN THE BALKANS AND EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN. THE COUNTERINTELLIGENCE METHODS OF TRANSNATIONAL GROUPS

In the post-Cold War era, new challenges emerged that have threatened regional and global security. Before the turn of the 21st century, the world was primarily dominated by states, but now, non-state actors are of critical importance in national and international security in today's globalizing and multipolar world. Of these non-state actors, transnational organized crime networks and groups have become a key security threat in the national, regional, and global environment. Transnational organized crime groups threaten to destabilize basic societal, economic, and political institutions and values. While all nations face the threat of transnational organized crime groups, those post-war and post-conflict nations in transition are especially fragile to the effects that transnational organized crime groups can have on a nation's government, economy, and society. The Balkan region has all been plagued by conflict and instability since the civil wars of the 1990s. Today, the Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean region has reemerged with strategic importance as the instability of nations in these regions are particularly susceptible to external malign influence by state and non-state actors. Concerns regarding the rise of transnational organized crime and its relationship with religious extremist groups have caused the international community to refocus on the Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean regions. Increasingly, transnational organized crime groups along with international terrorist groups are beginning to share organizational and operational features. Additionally, when it becomes advantageous, these groups will partner with each other. Transnational organized crime networks and groups have grown in both size and sophistication, and many major groups behave and assume the structure of secret organizations. Powerful transnational organized crime groups have developed in accordance with the structures of their host countries, which is why it is these groups flourish in those countries with more fragile political institutions. The ways in which transnational organized crime groups think and operate have made them successful. These groups take their illicit business ventures seriously, and understanding what these groups do, how they operate, and who they work with is critical in defeating them. By examining effective counterintelligence methods, this paper will focus on the strategic importance of transnational organized crime in the Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean region, with a particular focus on Albania.