Suchergebnisse

Critical security studies have become increasingly popular among Czech scholars, but most studies in this field are based on securitization theory and other discursive approaches to security analysis. This paper argues for broadening the scope of theoretical approaches to security studies and introduces International Political Sociology as a promising strand of research in this respect. International Political Sociology is based on the study of security as practice, and offers a more complex understanding of how security is constructed and performed. The article discusses the theoretical roots of this approach, reviews the main strands of contemporary International Political Sociology research, and introduces its analytical tools. Finally, the paper critically reflects on the theoretical, methodological and empirical aspects of International Political Sociology and outlines possible avenues for this research in the Central European context. Adapted from the source document.

This study seeks to make a contribution to a limited research on the systemic level of the national coordination of European affairs, which involves both domestic institutions and a permanent representation at the EU and national embassies in the EU member states and other countries. We explore the issue through a case study which concentrates on 1) several middle-sized EU member states and 2) coordination in the field of foreign and security policy. The study argues that the coordination at the systemic level has a rather a centralized character. The elements of decentralization, which can be also identified at the systemic level, are primarily related to information-gathering as well as representation at negotiations. Permanent representations are considerably more involved in coordination than national embassies, however. Adapted from the source document.

The ambition of the paper is to analyze the major characteristics of the Chinese energy policy towards the most important producers of natural gas in Chinas neighborhood. The analytical perspectives of a strategic approach to energy security and state-centric realism are used to work with case studies of Sino-Russian and Sino-Turkmen relations from the energy security perspective. The paper concludes that Chinas energy policy towards the given producers in Russia and Turkmenistan comes significantly close to the selected analytical perspectives and that natural gas has become an important part of the strategic considerations of the Chinese political leadership. This conclusion, however, applies more to Turkmenistan and less to Russia, as in the case of the Sino-Russian relations, both parties fail to achieve a mutual complementarity, and economic thinking prevails over Beijing's strategic interests. Adapted from the source document.