Suchergebnisse

The article analyzes Russian direct investments in Latin America, their scale and structure. The study is based both on official statistics on foreign direct investment (FDI) stocks and on information about the investments of Russian MNEs in Latin American countries published on company websites and in the media (including trans-shipping FDI). It is shown that Latin America has attracted insignificant Russian FDI so far, and it looks modest even against the background of Africa which is also poorly developed by Russian MNEs in the Global South. Moreover, in Africa there are at least bridgeheads for further Russian investment expansion. There are several negative factors: the remoteness of Latin America from Russia, language barriers, the lack of sufficient awareness of potential investors about business development opportunities in the region and the general backlog accumulated over the past periods from Western and local investors-competitors in business activity in Latin America. Moreover, individual significant projects of Russian direct investors are still to a small extent related to the structure of commodity exports from Russia to various Latin American states. In 2022 conditions for new Russian direct investments in most countries of the region have not improved at all due to sanctions pressure on Russia from the United States and EU countries, traditionally dominant among investors in Latin America (along with mutual flows of FDI made by their own Latin American MNEs). At the same time, the article emphasizes that without the entry of Russian MNEs into the number of major players, at least in most countries of the region, it is impossible to talk about a full-fledged economic turn of the Russian Federation to the global South.

The article is devoted to the typology of potential centers of power of the new world order. It is shown that it is too early to write off classical political-geographical and geopolitical concepts into the archive - in particular, the population, the size of the territory (with its saturation with natural resources), the volume of GDP (including when calculating the purchasing power parities of currencies) still determine the weight of countries on the world stage. Despite the development of institutions of multilateral regulation of international relations and certain successes of some regional integration projects, the place of states in the transforming world order is largely determined by their veto power in the UN Security Council, the arsenal of nuclear weapons, proliferation in the world and the general status of their state language. We have identified a little more than two dozen possible centers of power, grouped into four types: (1) Superpowers of disappeared bipolar world (USA and Russia are the two developed countries with sufficient military and political tools and large-scale population, territory and national economies to demonstrate the obvious claim to the promotion of a new global cultural and ideological project); (2) Giants of the East (China and India in some respects are surpassing the United States and Russia, but yet related to economically developing countries and inferior to the first two, especially India, for foreign weight); (3) Major advanced countries (Japan, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain); (4) Rising regional powers (Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey and others). The composition of the types, especially the most numerous fourth, is quite controversial, which is shown in detail in the article. In particular, an explanation is given why states such as Canada, Australia, the Republic of Korea or Bangladesh cannot be considered as possible centers of power of the new world order, even conditionally "second echelon".

Transregionalization has already become a powerful trend in world politics. States and regional associations employ transregional initiatives to realize their own and collective interests. This new level of international interaction embraces a wide range of actors and fosters interconnectedness based on geographical proximity but shared functional preferences. Given the opposition between isolationism and disintegration, there is a problem of the relation between transregionalization and globalization. If the processes are unidirectional, then transregionalization is a stage of globalization. If they contradict each other, transregionalization facilitates the creation of new dividing lines.Considering several cases of megaprojects, especially in the Asia-Pacific, the article substantiates the typology of transregionalization, emphasizing its cooperative (inclusive and aimed at global integration) and competitive form (mostly exclusive and impossible to converge with other projects). The author stresses that strengthening functional ties makes transregionalization an adaptive version of globalization driven by common interests and shared views of future global development paths. Intensification of transregional relations is likely to stimulate globalization and integration practices and the participation of state and nonstate actors in global governance.In today's world politics, transregionalization exists mainly in the form of projects and initiatives. This signifies both difficulties in reaching consensus on further cooperation and conservative states' policy towards participating in such large-scale associations. However, the very emergence of transregional associations with varying degrees of convergence and institutionalization, promoting specific institutional and economic development and cooperation patterns, strengthens multipolarity of the international system.

The US space activities from their inception have been closely connected with the private sector. However, only in 2010s private space companies have come to play a prominent role not only on the global market of space services but in the field of international security as well. At the same time, this trend towards commercialization of outer space use and the growing role of the private space sector in ensuring national security is still understudied. This paper aims to partially fill this gap by assessing approaches to these issues adopted by the administration of D. Trump. In the first section the author notes that both conceptual and legal frameworks of private space activities lack clarity and proposes an operational definition of the phenomenon. The second section provides a brief overview of the key strategic policy documents of the Trump's administration including those on commercial use of space in general and its implications for the US national security in particular. The third section identifies the trend towards the institutionalization of the US Space Forces as one of the priorities of the Trump's administration military policy. The fourth section thoroughly examines key forms and areas of the public–private partnership in commercial use of space, including launch services, communication services, intelligence gathering, as well as production and maintenance of satellites. Finally, the fifth section assesses the prospects for private space activities given the current tightness of the space services market and growing competition. The author concludes that private space plays a subsidiary role within the US national security and is still heavily dependent on state support. Nevertheless, the scope of public–private cooperation is expanding and the models of interaction are changing. The Trump's administration has contributed to the development of the industry through liberalization of regulations and involvement of private sector in the new large-scale projects, such as the Artemis program. The other important outcome of the space policy of the 45th President of the United States is anchoring of private space activities in the US national security strategy documents.