Why do some states get recognized, while others are denied the privilege? This article examines the underlying logic behind the contingency and inconsistency in the application of statehood standards to unrecognized, de facto states. When it comes to the practice of state recognition, the article argues, it is not merely a question of Great Power politics. Nor is it a question of whether a state has earned sovereignty and thus has a legally rightful claim to international recognition. Instead, the norms of state recognition can be better understood as a reflection of the balance of powers in the international order, rather than being a guiding principle for assessing claims to statehood. Central to this balance is the question of whether right corresponds with might and vice versa. If such a balance is absent, we observe what are considered to be double standards in the practice of international recognition. The theoretical framework draws on Baruch Spinoza’s idea of right being coextensive with power. Based on this assumption, the article demonstrates that the problem is not the incoherence of norms regulating international recognition, but rather the absence of a necessary equilibrium between might and right to ensure the universal applicability of those norms. The argument is illustrated through a comparison of the right to self-determination that was granted to peoples in former colonies during the Cold War period and the US-led recognition of Kosovo, followed by Russia’s recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008. The article shows that the practice of international recognition is conditional on global responses to particular concerns and circumstances. It is thus contingent on the degree to which powers agree as to how to address these concerns. The key suggestion put forward in the article is that, ultimately, there is no significant conceptual difference between the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples that marked the shift from the achievement of eff ective statehood to eventual independence and the 2008 wave of recognitions for non-colonial cases. Both show that norms and their enforcement depend on the same logic of right and power being mutually constitutive.

The study of Russia’s foreign policy poses something of a paradox. On the one hand, Russia’s actions are viewed as aimed at revising the existing rules-based order built by the end of the Cold War. On the other hand, on numerous occasions, one pinpoints that Russia has devised a language similar to the Western nations to justify its foreign policy. I call the phenomenon that explains this paradox the game of interpretation. The article illustrates how Russia is engaged in the game of interpretation with the West in the post-Cold War order by Russia’s appliance to the norm of humanitarian interventions. By analyzing the Russian discourse during the Russo-Georgian War (2008), I demonstrate how the Russian foreign policy leadership reproduces similar narrative patterns used by the West during the Kosovo War (1999). Exemplifying the game of interpretation by humanitarian interventionism is not accidental. Humanitarian interventionism is studied in the literature as being characteristic of the Western ‘ethical foreign policy’ originated by the end of the Cold War, with Russia being depicted as either skeptical or as an unequivocal opponent of such an approach in world politics. Methodologically, the work builds on quantitative and qualitative analysis of selected texts compiled from the archives of NATO and the US State Department, as well as the website “Kremlin.ru” and the website of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

While some of the UN member states refrain from providing peacekeepers due to security reasons, the UN frequently turns to the private security market for support. In turn, private military and security companies (PMSCs) take on risky missions and fill in the procurement gaps. It is common practice to criticize PMSCs for not having a clear international legal status, operating in the “grey” area of the law and not being accountable for their actions. Furthermore, the UN often equates PMSCs to mercenaries of the past and calls for strict regulation and surveillance of their activities. This practice has remained unchanged since the 1992 reforms, and the UN has done nothing to reduce the involvement of PMSCs in peacekeeping missions. On the contrary, it has, under pressure from lobbyists for the private security industry, actually increased security expenditures for PMSCs by unprecedented amounts. The UN’s position as a unique universal intergovernmental organization exempts it from a great deal of transparency, accountability and reform. While the private security industry includes various PMSCs that compete for contracts in conflict zones and post-conflict areas, the UN does not have any kind of competitor in peacekeeping procedures. The UN criticizes PMSCs for their blatant human rights violations and disregard of international law, yet continues to contract them for its peacekeeping missions. This paper examines the problem of involving PMSCs in UN peacekeeping operations. It aims to answer the following main questions: How do PMSCs, as partners of the UN in the peacekeeping process, contribute to the protection of human rights, which is one of the organization’s basic declared principles? Can PMSCs become a recognized instrument within the UN system? Would UN peacekeeping eff orts improve as a result of hiring PMSCs?

The adoption of the 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) marked Washington’s official pivot to “great power competition” as the conceptual framework for U.S. foreign policy. The shift to great power competition as the foundation for U.S. foreign policy represents an acknowledgment that the “forever wars” in the Middle East had become an expensive, strategically dubious distraction from the more pressing challenge posed by a revanchist Russia and a rising China. The template for much of the “new” thinking about great power competition is the Cold War – the last time the U.S. faced a peer competitor – whose shadow hangs over much thinking about U.S. policy toward Beijing and Moscow. In many ways, though, the Cold War was an outlier in the history of U.S. foreign policy, a product of very specific circumstances that are unlikely to be replicated in the 21st century. A danger exists in seeing the Cold War as a typical example of great power competition, or in using it as a template for U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century. Great power competition is usually a chronic condition, which is to say, more or less incurable. In order for a country like the United States to enter a new era of great power competition with China and Russia, it will need to convince the American public that the stakes are high and the dangers are great enough to justify the costs. Without the ideological or existential stakes of the Cold War, public support for an assertive strategy of containing Chinese and Russian influence will likely be hard to maintain. Rather, the U.S. is likely to continue the reversion toward its pre-Cold War pattern of seeking to insulate itself from the dangers of the world, and increasingly pass the burden of resisting the expansion of Chinese and Russian influence to others.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the socio-political transformation of the Arab world in the 2010s. The author analyses its changes through the concept of neo-modernity, which was already developed in a number of his earlier publications. The key thesis is the idea of a new turn of society to metanarratives, or “big stories” after postmodern relativism led to attempts to abandon them. In the first part of the article, the problem of metanarratives is considered at the theoretical level. The author proposes a methodology for studying socio-political processes and determines the influence of the condition of neo-modernity on political reality. The second part of the article highlights the main modern (liberal, left, nationalist, conservative) and premodern (tribal, Islamist) “big stories”. These “stories” determine the content and nature of public and political life in the Arab world in the 2010s and problematize new aspects of social relations. It shows how the actualization of metanarratives affected the course of the political process in Arab countries, as well as the organization of political systems, building new relations between societies and states. The third part of the article is devoted to the analysis of international political processes in the region. The influence of “big stories” on the configuration of the regional subsystem, armed conflicts, the composition of key actors, the specifics of their strategies, their identity and the identity of the region as a whole is revealed. In conclusion, the author shows a possibility of gradual harmonization of the system of regional relations in the case of the formation of hypertext, which makes it possible for the coexistence of actors guided by different narrative strategies.

In international relations, the last three decades have been marked by national and institutional fragmentation. The fate of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, and the regrettable way that events played out (especially in the former case), could befall other federative entities as well. Canada and Belgium come to mind, as do countries like Spain, all of which effectively function as federations. However, while federations usually have dispute settlement and mechanisms for secession embedded in their constitutions, sub-constitutive territories are often excluded from such considerations. What territories such as Kosovo, Sandjak, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, etc. have in common is that they share a desire for independence from their parent country. However, achiveing independence would present risks to the territorial integrity of other countries (what can be termed the domino principle), as well as risks to the endurance of flexible international law. The cases we have alluded to above culminated in the Crimean crisis. The problems between Estonia and the Russian Federation stem from the choice of precedent and founding text on which to base the former’s renewed independence. While Estonia was founded on the basis of the 1920 Tartu Peace Treaty that put an end to the country’s War of Independence, its experience as a Soviet Republic added another legislative filter in the form of the 1977 Constitution of the Soviet Union. However, the principle of uti possidetis had evolved to apply to more than cases of colonialism. Thus, when Estonia seceded from the USSR with the borders it had been since 1945, it was doing so under the principle of uti possidetis. The current dispute stems from the fact that the Estonian political elite seek to have the 1920 Tartu Peace Treaty recognized as the foundational document for the country’s renewed independence. Under the Treaty, Estonian sovereignty applied over a much larger territory. By insisting that any new border arrangement with Russia be based on that Treaty, Estonia is invalidating the principle of uti possidetis and the validity of the Constitution of the Soviet Union as a vehicle for independence. It implies a latent Article 5 situation between NATO and Russia, and threatens the legitimacy of other post-Soviet secessions.

The Great Pandemic of 2020 has caused a shock to international politics. But has it forced a radical restructuring of the international system and a change in the way international actors behave? a survey of the effects of the pandemic demonstrates that it has sped up existing trends, but has not brought about any transformation. The three-tier international system established after 1945 survives, but the struggle between two contesting models of global order (the Atlantic power system and the associated liberal international order and the alignment of sovereign internationalist powers) has intensified to consolidate a nascent new bipolarity in international affairs. Multilateralism has long been under threat, but its degradation has accelerated as bodies such as the World Health Organization have been challenged over their handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and the dangers of distant supply chains and the recrudescence of nationalism have accelerated deglobalisation. The legitimacy of state action has been revalidated as the only effective actor in handling the crisis. But this has been accompanied by the intensification of national populist challenges not only to liberal universalism, but also to sovereign internationalism. The return of great power politics entails the accelerated erosion of the dense structures of the international community developed in the post-war years, and signals a return to the period when a previous international system (the Vienna order established in 1815) came to an end in the early years of the 20t h century. Attacks on the UN and other multilateral institutions of the Yalta era means that the struggle between the rival models of world order will be less constrained by the guardrails of the international system, and thus the Second Cold War may well be more dangerous than the first.