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In the article, the guest editor Piotr Dutkiewicz and editor-in-chief Yuriy M. Pochta introduce the current issue of the journal, interpreting cross-cutting topics such as democratic development and the construction of national identity in the societies of the East and the West. They believe that the most appropriate heuristic explanation for these issues today is the idea that after the end of the Cold War the hopes for the final victory of the liberal democratic project on a global scale ended in disappointment. The end of history never took place, just like the victory of communism did not take place previously. All these years we have been witnessing an imitation of liberalism, the era of which is already over. There is currently a global revolt against the liberal imitation imperative. From this point of view, there is a great interest in articles devoted to Russian-Turkish relations, the place of the Central Asian states in the international rankings of democratic development, the evolution of the political development of the Lebanese Republic, the formation of democratic political regimes in such Eastern European EU member states as Poland and Hungary, the role of parties in the political life of Great Britain and Nigeria, as well as such theoretical and methodological problems of political science as the processes of forming future political leaders, methodology of the study of GR-management and approaches to the study of the political and psychological characteristics of the heads of Russian regions. In general, this issue of the journal pictures the current state of democratic development of Western and non-Western countries in the context of globalization, which is at the stage of transition from American monopolarity to multipolarity, from imitation of the Western liberal-democratic project to the search for its own development projects. The authors believe that from the point of view of Russia and its interests the materials of this issue allow for outlining the prospects for further research on ways to build the most effective relations with world and regional powers, the possibilities of protecting its sovereignty and its geopolitical interests, and the mechanisms for forming the Russian post-Soviet identity at the national and regional levels.

This paper explores one of the central issues of current international discourse : how is world order sustained and maintained, is it shifting and changing, is it being reinvented and reimagined, or are we on the cusp of global disorder and competition among great and small powers? The conventional lens used to examine these questions is that of ‘hegemony’ or ‘dominance.’ This paper discusses how hegemony is conceptualized, what kinds of resources are mobilized (material, discursive, institutional, and performative) in maintaining hegemony, and what the current chessboard of geopolitics looks like in terms of rising and falling powers. Despite a chaotic picture of the train derailed there is also an optimistic end of that story. First we are moving from a unipolar to the polycentric world. Secondly that new world will be less dramatically divided as it will be based on macro-regional arrangements. Thirdly multi-regional arrangements will be closer civilizationally and thus less prone to conflicts. Finally - in order to survive - most probably they will voluntarily keep close ties with other macro-regiond making the system more stable that today.

Piotr Dutkiewicz is the professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Center for Governance and Public Policy at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). He got his education at Warsaw University and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was a Visiting Fellow at St. Peter’s and Nuffield Colleges in Oxford and a Visiting Professor at Berkeley University, Institute for International Relations. He is a member of the Valdai Club, a group of forty renowned experts on Russia. In 2009, he received the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation from President Dmitry Medvedev. In this interview professor Dutkiewicz will tell us about the main contradictions shaping the new world order.

Globally, universities today face at least four sets of challenges. The first is to meet the expectation to prepare people for jobs available in today’s globalized economy and to rethink yesterday’s teaching practices. Secondly, it is necessary to create an educational system that prepares students to work in fields that do not exist today, therefore, further investment in teachers’ skills should take place. Third, many scholars are pursuing their personal careers in an environment of high competition, so they are becoming politically and socially too “correct”. Fourth, Universities have to undergo structural reforms that in the long term will limit broader access to higher education. Universities need to change and undergo a transition from: (1) teacher-centric to learning-centric education, (2) classroom-based teaching to anyplace, anytime learning, (3) mandated courses to hyper-individualized learning, (4) a general population of consumers to a growing population of producers.