Search results

The paper is devoted to the analysis of internal and foreign political processes in Georgia in 2015. This analytical chronicle is to trace and describe the most important tendencies in such fields as the contention between political parties, the balance within the ruling coalition and the relations with Georgia's key foreign partners. Though "Georgian Dream" (GD) government met the crisis and had to change premier by the end of the year, it managed to keep the leading position in domestic politics. The main opponent of the GD, the United National Movement (UNM) could not increase its influence. The Republican party of Georgia, the member of ruling coalition that has rather weak support from the voters, was able to strengthen its position in the government by getting some key offices. The expansion of cooperation with NATO does not bring near prospects of membership. Although every single measure the sides are taking seems to be insignificant, as a complex these measures can lead to a deeper involvement of NATO and USA in the South Caucasus. The relations with European Union are inertial and strongly overestimated in Georgian internal politics. The relations with Russia are routinized; both sides acknowledge the achievements of the normalization and do not expect any breakthrough.

From a historical perspective, the curbing of epidemics was the collateral effect of emerging European Modern states. The current COVID-19 pandemic reminds that. It supports the broad international tendency to strengthen state sovereignty, nationalism, and economic protectionism. Meanwhile, in recent decades health care systems around the world have been evolving toward deregulation, use of market mechanisms, and decrease of state interventions, and it was one of the most salient evidence that Modern state is being deconstructed. The current crisis puts forward the prospect that Modern comes back with the following social conflicts, interstate rivalry, and growing power inequality between the international system actors.

The West is concerned over the crisis of the liberal world order attributing it to the conduct of emerging powers, such as China, India and Russia. Are its concerns legitimate? Drawing on social identity theory, the authors analyze the emerging powers' stances on international development through the lens of status dynamics. In particular, three issue areas are investigated: the debate over the UN development agenda, which has revealed differences between Western and non-Western approaches, the changes in the membership of donor and recipient groups over the last decade and the discourse of emerging countries concerning science and technology, which betrays their self-image of a "developed" or "laggard" state.The key finding of the paper is that the crisis of the liberal world order as a set of institutions created by the US-led countries after WWII manifests itself in the distorting symbolic exchange between developed and developing countries. The emerging states are unwilling to recognize the authority of the West and its leadership in setting the direction of global development. Meanwhile, they are trying to gain the status of development front-runners using their own foreign aid programs and science and technology development strategies. However, the rising states are not uniform and consistent in posing a symbolic challenge to the liberal order – while the Russia is striving for a "developed non-western country" status (thereby copying the USSR's image), India and China, though to different degrees, are positioning themselves both as developed industrial states and as developing countries which receive aid packages from richer members of the international community. What leads to the distortions in this symbolic exchange is the desire of some emerging powers to use the resources of the West and reap the benefits of the world order created by it while denying it a high status. Thus, a classic economic "free-rider problem" arises in international relations: while benefiting from the liberal order created by the West, the rising states do not recognize the status it ascribes itself ignoring the symbolic hierarchy which, as viewed by western countries, underlies this order.The authors declare the absence of conflict of interest.

.