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There have been several overlapping crises in North Africa in recent decades. The social contract is in crisis, and this became clear during the antiauthoritarian uprisings of 2011 and 2019. In addition, the region is locked in a socioeconomic crisis that deepened after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and has been aggravated by the global impacts of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This paper underscores the need to reflect on the legitimation of the North African elites in this context, looking at the connection between the domestic and international spheres. It also presents various legitimation strategies that take in the interaction between the domestic and external spaces. This approach seeks to enrich the debate on the relationship between authoritarianism, its legitimation and the international dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is democracy's place in the shifting international order? There is a fear that a more geopolitical order will only aggravate the general crisis of democracy; or that a more plural order will dilute the efforts to defend the rules governing it. Yet, while recent political and normative trends corroborate this concern, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has in some ways given greater prominence to the defence of democratic values around the world. This paper explores the impact that geopolitical tensions and shifting international order on global democracy. And in the context of the crisis of meaning affecting democracies, it examines whether Russia's war in Ukraine has served both as a catalyst of the international dimensions of support for democracy and as a factor magnifying its fragility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2014 and Russia's annexation of Crimea and the start of hostilities in Donbass, the West has shown unprecedented solidarity in imposing sanctions on Russia. Yet Asia-Pacific's response to the Ukraine crisis has been different. While Japan and New Zealand imposed symbolic sanctions, South Korea refrained from introducing any measures at all. The main objective of this paper is to explore the response of the Asia-Pacific region to the Ukrainian crisis and the underlying motivations behind these stances. From a perspective of sanctions coordination and alliance behaviour theory, this paper examines the interaction between domestic and international factors when states decide whether (or not) to join international sanctions coalitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the effects on Belarus of European Union (EU) sanctions against Russia, on the one hand, and Russian sanctions on Ukrainian and EU goods, on the other. International sanctions opened up new political and economic opportunities that the Belarusian authorities sought to capitalise on. But Minsk's attempts to swim between two waters (retaining the benefits Moscow offered while improving relations with the EU) have backfired and distrust towards Minsk has grown in Moscow, Brussels and Kiev. A theoretical approach is made to the foreign policy of small states, before this paper shows how Belarus has been harmed by its attempts to take advantage of EU and Russian sanctions regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ostensibly, Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential elections should have placed United States international policy back on a familiar path. However, despite the prevalence of a highly traditional vision of US foreign policy, the Biden administration has maintained significant continuities with the previous administration, as reflected in the policy towards China and the withdrawal from Afghanistan. In part, this is due to the constraints produced by the deep divisions that exist at domestic level. This paper aims to unravel the fundamental elements of Biden's foreign policy, focusing on possible ideological and doctrinal elements, strategic priorities, and any continuities and changes relative to his predecessor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the war between Ukraine and Russia in the Donbass and the earlier crisis over Crimea, this paper examines four speeches by Vladimir Putin to identify and map populist elements in his discursive and formal strategies of justifying and creating a specific form of conflict. The analysis shows how this populism goes beyond the people/establishment dichotomy and is based on complex notions of enmity and alliance, a very broad definition of the Russian nation, a new division of the political space, and the introduction of new symbols of unity and the reaffirmation of old ones beyond the borders of today's Russia. This casts a new shadow over Russian foreign policy in the post-Soviet space. Clarity is sought on questions about the Ukrainian conflict, but it is also hoped new elements will be brought to the existing literature on populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author argues that Russian policy- and opinion-makers, having borrowed the concept of multipolarity from the (neo)realist vocabulary, very often they use it in a much broader sense of narratives on Russian identity and subjectivity and, therefore, attach to it quite different non-realist meanings, which include issues of identity and non-state actorship. What hides beneath the pretended realist wording of Russian discourse is a much more complicated and variegated -though not always consistent- set of policy imageries. Against this background, the Russian discourse on multipolarity reminds a patchwork of scattered and loosely tied "cognitive maps", based upon -and sustained by- certain visions of the world in the diversity of its actors. Since multipolarity originates in the sphere of ideas, it would be quite logical to assume that at certain time there might be more than one pattern of multipolar arrangements. Each of them gives a different answer to the question of what poles, nation states, regions, civilizations, or integrative constructs like EU and CIS are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]