Refugee Related Political Violence in Asia and Africa

This work focuses on the analysis of one of the most discussed phenomenon of recent years, the reception of refugees. The authors of this work examine refugee-related political violence, a phenomenon that has not been explored in the last twenty years. The aim is to describe the occurrence of this phenomenon in cases from Asia and Africa. The individual incidents are categorised into six categories of political violence. The authors describe the type of political violence involving refugees for the last 15 years. They also analyse which type of violence is most common. At the same time, they devote to the analysis and description of frequency, intensity and persistence. They compare their findings with similar work that was published in 1998, and they explain why and what changes have occurred in the field of refugee-related political violence over the last 15 years.

Indivisible Security and Collective Security Concepts: Implications for Russia’s Relations with the West

The indivisible security principle was first set out in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and since then has been included in numerous international treaties and national strategic documents. However, the concept remains ambiguous and has not received due attention. The collective security concept has in turn been studied extensively by researchers who represent different paradigms and who have come up with diverse understandings of the term. This article adds to the ongoing conceptualisation of collective security and indivisible security and considers the implications of both concepts for European and global security arrangements in the context of Russia’s relations with the West. First, I analyse the history of the indivisible security and collective security concepts and briefly review relevant literature. Further, I come up with my conceptualisation of both notions, illustrating the theoretical claims with the case of Russia’s relations with NATO and EU countries. Building on this analysis, I assess the implications of both approaches for European and global security. I conclude that the international system cannot solely rely on either collective security or indivisible security and state the need for a middle-ground approach based on the decoupling/compartmentalisation of different policy areas.

Global Maritime Fulcrum: Indonesia’s Middle Power Strategy Between Belt And Road Initiatives (BRI) and Free-Open Indo Pacific (FOIP)

The purpose of this article is to correlate Indonesia’s global maritime fulcrum (GMF) as Indonesia’s middle power strategy to its responseto the two geopolitical strategies of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) of China and the Free andOpen Indo-Pacific (FOIP) of the Quad (the United States, India, Japan and Australia). This article used the process-tracing method to examine the information sourced from journal articles, news media outlets, government press releases and other resources. The article unfolds in four sections. The first explains the background of why the global maritime fulcrum was chosen as Indonesia’s middle power strategy response tothe BRI and FOIP. The second explains how Indonesia usesthe GMF as its middle power strategy. The third part explores how the middle power strategy through the GMF policy responds tothe BRI. The last part elaborates on Indonesia’s strategy when responding to the FOIP. It concludes that it is prevalent that Indonesia usesthe GMF as its middle power strategy when responding to the BRI and FOIP.

Revisiting the Causes of Russian Foreign Policy Changes: Incoherent Biographical Narrative, Recognition and Russia's Ontological Security-Seeking

This paper examines the relationship between international practices of recognition and state quest for ontological security, on the one hand, and Russia's most recent identity makeover as well as increasingly aggressive foreign policy, on the other. I argue that in order to understand Russia's growing belligerence in foreign and security policies we need to examine the connection between Western refusal to recognize Russia's great power self-image, the effects this refusal has had on Russia's ontological security, and a subsequent shift in Russia's self-description from pro-Western to civilizational.

Practical Geopolitics in Cinematic Narratives of Marvel’s The Avengers Film Franchise

This article implies that cinematic narratives project practical geopolitical discourses by using the example of Marvel Cinematic Universe’s success – The Avengers film franchise. The conceptualisation of imaginary threats in the films that follow the main storyline of the Avengers assembly, determined by the time and the geographic space, give those threats a symbolical manifestation that tends to overlap with the practical geopolitical notions of American foreign policy, as well as contemporary international politics. The interpretative textual analysis of the films’ narratives and their relations to world politics, hence, presents the central methodology of this article. The relation between those two has a capacity to transmit a subconscious message to blockbusters’ consumers about preferable practical geopolitical visions in contemporary world politics. Simply, the paper shows how cinematic narratives form an identity that is deeply securitised and able to capture the Zeitgeist of world’s politics.