In recent years, the role of regional actors has increased against the backdrop of the global transformation of the world order and they begin to pursue independent policies, greatly reducing their dependence on the world's superpowers. In the Middle East, Iran and Saudi Arabia are becoming the most active actors. The article is devoted to the problem of relations between Iran and Arab countries (special attention is paid to Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Syria) in the last two decades, in the era of global transformation of the world order. In this context, it is important to note the strengthening role of the BRICS as a new important world pole, to which several Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, have joined. These processes have helped to reduce the intensity of conflicts in the region. Among the countries considered, Iran has historically had the closest relations with Syria. Iran made considerable efforts to support and reinforce Assad's government which was ultimately overthrown due to a combination of circumstances. Until recently, Iran's relations with Saudi Arabia have been tense, reaching a peak of confrontation during the Syrian war. In 2023, the two countries achieved normalization of relations, but in 2026, after the start of American-Israeli aggression against Iran, they again sharply deteriorated. The relations between Iran and Algeria (a BRICS candidate country) developed quite well during the period under review, and are expected to strengthen further in the future.
Trade liberalization initiated by the WTO has accelerated the flow of globalization in both developing and developed countries, affecting various economic sectors. However, the influence of globalization on export competitiveness, both in developing and developed countries, has not yet found a clear common ground. Therefore, this study examines the association between globalization and export competitiveness in the fruits and nuts sector, comparing 55 developing and 16 developed countries over the period 2003–2023. Secondary data was used in this study and the data were arranged in the form of panel data consisting of 55 developing countries and 16 developed countries between 2003 and 2023. The data were analyzed using a dynamic panel model estimated through the two-step System GMM approach, complemented by a pooled interaction regression. The results of the analysis show that globalization has a positive influence on export competitiveness in the fruits and nuts sector for developed countries, but has a negative influence on developing countries. Developed countries tend to be able to compete well when the flow of globalization increases, but developing countries suffer from weak mastery of technology and low quality of human resources.
The present article endeavors to provide a comprehensive review of contemporary research in the domain of success factors in ‘color revolutions.’ Despite the plethora of recent studies that seek to delineate the subsequent wave of research in the theory of revolutions, there is a paucity of literature that addresses the success factors in ‘color revolutions’ in conjunction with the mechanism of influence of these factors. This article aims to address this lacuna in the existing scholarship. A thorough analysis of contemporary works reveals that researchers worldwide, within the framework of the theory of revolution, have identified ten key factors contributing to the success of these events. Those factors encompass the role of unarmed revolutions, the ‘power of numbers,’ the impact of global democratization, the absence of violence, external influences, the erosion of loyalty among security forces, the role of the mass media, the duration of rule in an authoritarian regime / incumbent duration, the absence of natural resources, and the ethnic composition of the population.
The article is devoted to the philosophical understanding of the current issues of global development and the responsibility of philosophers for the state of affairs in the modern world. The article is based on interviews with three world-renowned and highly influential world-class philosophers who each served as President of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP) for five years; and now they are Honorary Presidents of this international philosophical organization. The publication of such an article is an extraordinary event, since it presents the most authoritative opinions on current global issues that concern not only philosophers, but also specialists in the field of global studies fr om various scientific and professional backgrounds.
The possible consequences of the decisions taken at the recent Conferences of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change COP26 (Glasgow 2021) and COP28 (Dubai 2023), for the world energy and future climate change are examined. A set of scenarios of anthropogenic impacts on the global climate system is proposed, including the full implementation of the Glasgow decisions on decarbonisation of the world economy, reduction of methane emissions and reforestation, as well as alternative scenarios for world energy development based on low options for changes in world population, in order to prevent dangerous global climate change. The global carbon cycle and climate models developed at MPEI have been used to simulate changes in the chemical composition and thermal radiation balance of the Earth's atmosphere, as well as the global average air temperature for each of the scenarios. It is shown that only the full implementation of the full range of measures proposed in Glasgow to reduce the anthropogenic impact on the planet's climate system, while maintaining the current growth rates in energy consumption and world population, will be able to keep warming below 1.5° C with reference to pre-industrial levels, but there are serious doubts about the practical implementation of the proposed program of decarbonisation of the world economy. At the same time, our findings suggest that the development of natural demographic processes can restrain growth and ensure a decrease in the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations even before the end of this century. In this case, the increase in global average temperature can be limited to a marginally safe level of 1.8 degrees above the pre-industrial period, without a large-scale restructuring of the world's energy sector. However, it is virtually certain that the 1.5 °C threshold will be exceeded within the next decade, and that the period of 1.5 °C temperature overshoot will last for more than a century. Already by the end of this century, global temperatures will have to be brought back down by explicitly removing carbon dioxide fr om the atmosphere: an immense task that will require a build-up of a negative-emissions economy.
This study examines the energy cooperation, geopolitical dynamics and regional development implications of the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline. The study uses a mixed-methods approach to assess the pros and cons of the pipeline. The results show increased energy stability, reduced dependence on LPG, additional energy sources, and lower energy prices. However, the pipeline poses geopolitical risks to Baluchistan's security, political upheaval, economic consequences, regional hostility, and US sanctions. Despite these challenges, the pipeline could reduce gas shortages, temporarily help industry, boost trade between the two nations, improve regional cooperation, create jobs, and reduce unemployment. Building the pipeline requires international cooperation to overcome sanctions, financial incentives, and active participation of regional stakeholders, technological breakthroughs, and international lobbying.
The world has undergone significant changes in recent decades. These transformations take different forms, but one of the most prominent ones is revolution. Revolutionary events in the twenty-first century are very diverse and tend to come in waves. The revolution in Sudan in 2019 is one of these events: it is not just a revolution or just a coup, it is a coupvolution and also part of the Arab Spring 2.0. This article argues that the events in Sudan have great significance for the reconfiguration of the World System because they are a coupvolution, a concept that combines the features of revolution and military coup. Thus, they represent a new type of revolutionary event that highlights the peculiarities of modern revolutionary movements and has the potential to significantly affect the world. The Sudanese coupvolution has also led to a power struggle in Sudan which affects the regional and global political landscape. It also attracts various regional and global actors who seek to influence the outcome of this struggle and gain better position in the region. Thus, the coupvolution led to Sudan to become one of the main stages of the reconfiguration. This article attempts to identify the main drivers of the Sudanese coupvolution, while also comparing it to other coupvolutions that have occurred in the past decade.
Review of Cybernetic Revolution and Global Aging. Humankind on the Way to Cybernetic Society, or the Next Hundred Years by Leonid Grinin, Anton Grinin, and Andrey Korotayev. Springer, 2024.
Population aging is expected to affect large parts of the world in the coming decades, leading to profound changes in various social, economic and financial institutions and infrastructure networks. Raising the old-age retirement (pension) age has been the most common response of the affected countries to this challenge, but it has proven neither sufficient nor popular with the respective populations. In this paper we analyze the projected magnitude of global aging under different fertility trajectories. It is shown that the sustainability of national pension systems will become untenable for many countries of the world unless they manage to achieve substantial increases in fertility. Thus, these countries should implement effective fertility-supporting measures in the near future in order to avoid major social crises. As we can see, fertility-supporting policies have the potential to be a remarkably powerful tool for offsetting some of the most adverse consequences of population aging.
We have devoted a number of studies to the analysis of global aging and its impact. The impact of global aging is multifaceted, and it will increase during the current century. However, not all aspects of the impact of global aging have been studied sufficiently. In particular, its impact on the political sphere has not been analysed sufficiently. The present scientific essay is aimed to demonstrate the impact of global aging on future transformations in the political sphere and the formation of a new world order.
Since China proposed the going-out strategy of HSRs in 2009, China's HSR diplomacy has sparked heated debates about China's intentions. Fr om an economic diplomacy perspective, this article attempts to understand China's HSR diplomacy in SEA fr om four dimensions: context, process, theatre, and outcomes. Available second-hand data show that China's HSR diplomacy, with a consistent tendency as China's overall economic diplomacy over the past 70 years, tends to be more economic than political. In SEA, however, China's growing economic influence has been accompanied by a declining regional reputation. China's increasingly pragmatic approach to protecting its overseas economic interests without making sufficient efforts to handle local opposition mainly caused by environmental and social factors, has led to local Sinophobic sentiments. The conflict represents a microcosm of China's overseas railway projects under the BRI, where the country is attempting to balance the pursuit of economic benefits with the maintenance of a positive global image.
The idea is substantiated that the advent of the Anthropocene epoch as a modern stage of global history and global evolution, in all its diversity of natural and socio-economic trends, has led to the aggravation of global risks (environmental, geopolitical, economic, social and technological) and the phenomenon of global security in all its manifestations (international, economic, food, military, information, spiritual, cognitive, etc.). The current situation necessitates the development of a theoretical and methodological basis for the study of global security in these areas, and the development of specific recommendations that are positioned in asphatronics as a theory of global security. Over the past two decades, risks associated with the development of artificial intelligence and the expansion of cognitive operations in the military and civilian spheres have been actively ‘implanted’ into the global risk group. Special attention is paid to the actualization of the problem of countering cognitive operations, which has led to the emergence of a new, sixth, domain of hybrid warfare, namely cognitive. Cognitive warfare poses global risks of a purely technological and geopolitical, economic, socio-anthropological and existential order. Cognitive warfare is interpreted as a war of ideologies, and the essence is to take control of people, organizations, nations, and to manipulate a person's consciousness and subconscious. The article substantiates the position that asphatronics, which claims to be a theory of global security, should be developed in close connection with cognitology (a system of cognitive sciences), one of the research areas of which is information, psychological and cognitive security.
Global networks of knowledge diffusion are both among the major products of globalization and its strongest factors, contributing significantly to its further development. However, in the course of the ongoing reconfiguration of the World System, which is likely to intensify in the coming decades, global knowledge networks, as well as international cooperation in science and research in general, are bound to experience profound structural changes. The paper examines Russia's current position in these networks and the recent dynamic changes in this position and in the structure of Russian researchers' international collaborations by focusing on the networks of international research co-authorship. At the first glance, the ongoing re-structuring of the system of Russian academic links with foreign countries could be attributed to the impact of sanctions, but this viewpoint fails to take into account the dynamics of the global academic co-authorship network and Russia's position within it over the past decades, which has been defined by the post-Soviet legacy and the abovementioned reconfiguration of the World System. Increasing investment in the domestic R&D, improving research infrastructure, and enhancing the quality of research can all make the World-System semi-peripheral and peripheral countries increasingly attractive R&D partners for each other. This factor is likely to contribute to the growth of the share of research collaborations between the countries outside the World-System core.
The academic scholarship on understanding Arab Spring and its role in constructing citizenship has been little. In this context, the paper will endeavor to study the Arab Spring in the light of its contribution to the civic empowerment of the Arab world. The argument is that one of the most effective ways to understand political contestation in the Middle East is through the lens of citizenship. Ultimately, politics revolves around the scope, nature, and depth of citizenship. This has become even more evident since citizenship rights have emerged as the primary concern in the region during the past three decades due to the enormous political expansion. A new social contract based on rights is the only way to fill the void left by the breakdown of the authoritarian bargaining contract. This paper will analyze how this Nahda (Renaissance) played its part in the debate of citizenship in the Arab world and how the debate of citizenship evolved during the Arab Spring and afterward. The paper has theoretically and analytically found that the Arab Spring was the immediate outcome of various factors particularly the long-overdue demand for citizenship rights in the contemporary political landscape.
Floods have become an alarming regularity in the riverine areas of Bangladesh, resulting in loss of life, collapsed agriculture, and damage to property. The purpose of the urgent measures required in Bangladesh's flood crisis is to minimize floods and reduce health hazards, and economic impacts. Available data highlight the widespread occurrence and associated risk factors for the flood crisis in Bangladesh. According to WHO (2020), the global impact of floods between 1998 and 2017 affected more than 2 billion people, underscoring the severity and widespread nature of this natural disaster. Bangladesh experiences four types of floods: flash floods, local rainfall floods, monsoon river floods, and storm-surge floods. Drawing on lessons from past flood events, the article explores adaptation mechanisms and policy interventions aimed at enhancing resilience and sustainable development. The governments, local authorities and youth are urged to address the current crisis by coordinating and integrating multiple effective efforts to prevent flood-related economic losses and deaths.
The ascension of Islamism in the Middle East is an articulation of the profound and far-reaching transformations transpiring within the political and cultural spheres. As a construct, Islamism is at the center of the public discourse regarding the interplay between Islam, Muslims and power. Despite disparities among Islamists in their perceptions of extremism, political participation and societal engagement, they hold in common several fundamental ideological tenets. Notwithstanding the enigmatic nature of these tenets, the diversity among Islamists in the extent to which they materialize these principles into action is profound. It is imperative to contextualize Islamism within the historical, social and economic contexts that have exerted an impact on its ideology and practices. In this regard, it is particularly important to situate contemporary Islamism within the context of globalization. The primary objective of this paper is to situate the emergence of Islamism within the framework of political economy and underscore the dialectical relationship between Islamist convictions and socio-economic transformations. The paper argues that by leveraging economic opportunities, Islamism has created alternative methods of existence. Islamism is seen as a confluence of organizations and endeavors that advocate for the diffusion of Islamic principles. Nonetheless, it has identified a battleground in the marketplace, where it can pursue a counter-hegemonic conflict with the dominant narrative of the establishment.
Destabilization is the most important and inevitable part of socio-political and other processes and trends throughout human history. Cycles of order and disorder, destabilization and stabilization, destruction and creation occur at all levels of society and the World System, in the most diverse forms and for the most diverse reasons. Finally, development never proceeds smoothly and is constantly accompanied by various, often very severe, shocks and cataclysms. The study of the types, forms and causes of destabilization, their classification and the clarification of the terminology of their analysis is a very important task, which, unfortunately, still does not receive a relevant attention. However, the better such a classification is worked out, the deeper these processes are understood, the more obvious it will become that all these often seemingly unrelated phenomena and processes are different forms of the general process of development of society and humanity as a whole. Can destabilization be avoided in principle? On the one hand, we can see that much has been achieved so far in terms of reducing the negative effects and mitigating the most destructive forms of destabilization. But on the other hand, we must not entertain vain hopes that we have succeeded in opening up a conflict-free way forward. The strength of the contradictions, the desire for power, the redistribution of resources, the imposition of one's own ideologies and points of view, the refusal to respect other ways of development, ways of life, etc. are so great that conflicts, unfortunately, become inevitable. And recent events in the world – the Special Military Operation, the escalation of the conflict in Palestine, etc. – have shown how fragile and even naive our hopes were that the era of wars was behind us. Thus, the study of destabilization and its forms becomes a highly topical and practical task. In the second section of the article, the authors analyze the close connection between the various processes of destabilization and the modern process of deeper transformation of the world order. The authors show in various aspects that destabilization and world order are actually closely related, since a change in the world order always leads to a change in the balance of power.
he work describes the process of formation of the inter-civilizational association BRICS and its transition to a new stage of development in connection with the expansion to BRICS 11 at the 15th summit in Johannesburg (South Africa, August 2023). The association is expected to expand further by admitting a second wave of states that are waiting for their turn. BRICS+ is now becoming the basis of a new, successfully emerging, equitable multipolar world order, which is becoming a real alternative to the short-lived unipolar world order with the US hegemony, supported by the G7 countries. Today, the BRICS association has already reached parity with the G7. But in the future, the balance of power will increasingly shift in favor of BRICS+. It is shown that BRICS+ will have sufficient technological sovereignty, a dominant supply of natural resources and financial institutions to allow a sustainable association to develop successfully in a world currently divided on a bloc basis. For the purpose of long-term modeling and forecasting of the economic development of the vanguard countries that are members of the BRICS+ and G7 associations, new models that adequately describe demographic dynamics and total factor productivity (TFP) have been selected, adapted, and partially developed. It is shown that a production function (PF) consisting of the above-mentioned two factors – demography and TFP – is sufficient for forecasting long-term economic growth. All models are verified using actual data on these factors for the period fr om 1950 to 2020 and show high approximation accuracy. The proposed models were used to calculate the projected trajectories of demographic dynamics, technological progress and economic growth of the BRICS+ and G7 vanguard countries. Their comparative analysis has been carried out, showing that in the context of the current geo-economic fragmentation of the world, the BRICS+ countries are able to develop autonomously and sustainably at a rapid pace and become the locomotive of world development, ensuring the sustainable development of the countries of the Global South. It is shown that by the middle of the twenty-first century, the share of the BRICS+ countries in the world economy is expected to reach 80 % and they will be home to about 2/3 of the world's population.
This article proposes the Virtual Global State (VGS) as an applicable model for a realistic utopia. Representing a virtual entity parallel to the real world, the VGS is an ambitious and long-term global initiative, and it is hoped that it will be the first step on the right and long road to a better future for human life on Earth. It is the appropriate and impartial body for thinking, discussing and preparing for the future of the world. It uses virtual space as a tool for solving real-world problems and improving its conditions using systematic methods with implementation phases and timelines. Liberating its virtual citizens fr om their national, ethnic, ideological and political differences, the VGS gives them an equal opportunity to obtain its global citizenship. Everyone in the real world, including people without real citizenship, has the right to belong to it and to have their own global ID card with an ID number. The article compares the VGS with the most prominent images of the ‘Virtuous City’ (utopia) and highlights the exclusive features of the VGS and its strategic objectives.
This study substantiates the need to use new theoretical knowledge for an objective understanding of the patterns of the development of humanity, their role in the construction of the information society and the digital economy at the present stage. This allows us to understand the causes of the emergence and persistence of the economic crises that have transformed into a global systemic crisis. There is also a danger that the achievements of science and technology can become a means of self-destruction for humanity with the help of its own intellectual high-tech developments. The role and consequences of the use of various modern high technologies in today's development paradigm, including artificial intelligence, are shown. The urgent need for the formation of a new developmental paradigm and the achievement of a crisis-free world in the intellectual and spiritual improvement and self-improvement of humans is substantiated.
