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The article raises the little-studied topic of the influence of the proletarian revolution in Germany, prepared in 1923 with the active support of the Comintern and the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), on relations between Poland and the USSR. The author relies on unpublished archival materials, first published and introduced into scientific circulation, revealing these events in a new light, declassified in the post-Soviet period. The work shows how, despite the presence of radical proposals that threatened a new large-scale war in Europe, the leadership of the RCP(b) chose a more pragmatic approach. Given the military power of the Polish state, Moscow decided to dispense with threats and intimidation that distinguished the Soviet approach to Poland from its policies towards Lithuania and Latvia in order to achieve the lifting of Warsaw's severe restrictions on transit between Germany and the USSR. In response, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) agreed to make a number of concessions, primarily on economic and financial issues, including the payment of 30 million rubles in gold to Poland, to which Warsaw was entitled under the Riga Peace Treaty and was actually sabotaged by Moscow. In addition, the USSR was ready to allow the transit of Polish goods to Persia. This plan did not work, since Poland was aware that the lifting of restrictions on transit between the USSR and Germany increased the chances of revolution in Germany, which threatened Poland with communist countries encircling it. In addition, by the time the Soviet mission arrived in Warsaw with the above-mentioned proposals, there was no longer much sense in insisting on such an exchange with strong opposition from Polish diplomats, since plans to organize a proletarian revolution in Germany had failed.

The article aims to explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the use of sanctions as a foreign policy tool. The following research questions are posed: in what way did COVID-19 affect the policy of sanctions around the world? To what extant did the initiators of sanctions change their restrictions? Where did COVID-19 rank on the global sanctions agenda? What was the position of the UN as a key institution of global governance and what was the reaction of the key countries that initiated the sanctions? The main hypothesis is that COVID-19 has not significantly altered the existing sanctions regime. No single initiator-state has changed its sanctions regime in principle, but states have made a number of humanitarian exemptions. However, these exemptions are limited and sanctions have continued to be imposed as usual. In some areas, COVID-19 has even exacerbated international tensions and raised the risks of sanctions, especially in U. S.—China relations. The hypothesis was tested using the event analysis method of sanctions episodes during the pandemic (March-June 2020). The research provides an analysis of quantity and quality of events and their distribution among initiators. Emphasis is placed on the study of events connected to COVID-19. The results reveal a limited impact of COVID-19 on sanctions policy and highlight the weakness of the UN to affect the behavior of key sanctions initiators even in conditions of a global threat such as COVID-19.

Climate politics forms a subsystem of world politics. In this subsystem, states are differentiated by their ambitions to decarbonize their economies. These ambitions proceed from national policies and the nationally determined contributions (NDC) submitted by states in accordance with the Paris Agreement. Based on states' climate ambitions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) produce multiple reports ranking states and evaluating their contributions. The main parameter of state differentiation by climate ambition is the expected year of achieving carbon neutrality. In 2019–20, the UK and the European Union (EU) promoted this parameter with the Green Deal, and eventually other metrics were overshadowed. The previously used climate parameters and rankings based on them were contradictory and depended heavily on the chosen methodology. Apart from being untrustworthy, they put some western countries in unfavourable positions. N. Luhmann's new systems theory identifying "carbon neutrality" is taken as the main code of the climate communication subsystem that differentiates the climate subsystem of world politics from other functional subsystems. In this review article, how the emerging code of carbon neutrality is used by states and international organizations to form a new hierarchy in international relations is examined. Various constructivist and normative theories, from Foucault's poststructuralism to the historicism and normativity of the English School, are applied in order to capture the possible implications of the political use of carbon neutrality for international relations. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential prospects of climate politics hierarchization for power redistribution in international relations.

The article aims at defining the key estimates made by the British political leadership in relation to the Washington conference, held in 1921–1922. Four documents, taken from the UK National Archives and published for the first time, formed the "skeleton" of the research. A commentary is attached to each document. The author also used other archival materials and published diplomatic evidence to reconstruct the context of the British estimates. The author concludes that the perception of the Washington conference's results made by the political leadership of the UK and the Foreign Office correlates with the ideas that dominated in the historiography. The conference was seen mainly as a success, enabling London to achieve interconnected aims, i.e. to lessen Anglo-American tensions, to escape the naval armaments race, and to redistribute resources and money for financial and economic reconstruction. However, it would be misleading to see the Washington conference as the date of the birth of Pax Anglo-Americana, or to superimpose the realities of the post-1945 era on the interwar period. The decisions of 1921–1922 did not preclude the Anglo-American struggle for supremacy, and British leaders were not prepared to become the U.S. junior partners, as it would happen later.

The article highlights several areas that pose challenges for social science today. One of the challenges is the study of culture. The evolution of interest in culture in the social sciences is traced through an appeal to the role of culture in eco­nomics, which was an ideal type of ignoring culture for the most part of the 20th century. A paradigmatic shift towards interest in the study of culture at the turn of the 20th and the 21st centuries temporarily expelled society from the main forces that determine human behavior. This approach is no less reductionist than the previous expulsion of culture. The growing attention to the role of culture somewhat obscures the discussion of the problems caused by the spread of global capitalism and the development of digital technologies. Several other challenges stem from the changes in the internal and external contexts of social knowledge production. In our opinion, the idea of human rights is becoming a new significant context both for discussing the challenges of digitalization, and external challenges to science. The author maintains the right to one's own knowledge and public expression of judgment, to some extent reduces the grow­ing restrictions in other areas of the human rights exercise.

The article is devoted to international aspects of interaction between domestic regions and national states. In the course of the research the author considers a number of foreign models of interaction between the state and domestic regions, compares them with the Russian experience, shows the negative impact of globalization process both on nation-states and domestic regions. The aim of the article is to show how the model of interaction between the state and regions is changing under the influence of external factors.

The article analyzes the phenomenon of archaization in world politics and identifies its algorithm in contemporary circumstances. It studies two main modes of archaization – dissociative (archaization as fragmentation and/or decay) and temporal (archaization as synchronization with past political practices and conditions). The paper makes a conclusion that it is impossible to use each of these logics separately due to limitations in their heuristic value. During the synthesis of dissociative and temporal modes, it emphasizes the complexity of the design of the archaization as a two-stage process – the temporal order desynchronization with subsequent disintegration trends and its synchronization with the patterns and practices of the past, broadcast through the institutional memory of polities. The work builds a model of desynchronization in world politics, which is tested on the case of the concept of Hungarian mafia state. This model can become a relevant explanatory framework for both state and societal actors of contemporary world politics.