The Aegean dispute between Türkiye and Greece remains one of the most persistent interstate rivalries in the Eastern Mediterranean, structured around overlapping claims and recurrent frictions concerning maritime zones, national airspace, and the (de)militarised status of Aegean islands, islets, and rocks. While episodes of escalation – most notably the Kardak/Imia crisis–have periodically raised the risk of a wider confrontation, the conflict has largely been managed through controlled, low-intensity interaction rather than open warfare. This article explains that pattern through a gametheoretic model that formalises the strategic interdependence of the two actors and clarifies the logic of their observed behaviour.

The study models the dispute as a sequential game in which each side is assumed to act rationally and can choose among three stylised strategies–aggressive, passive-aggressive, and passive–depending on its assessment of the situation and the expected response of the other.

A decision tree specifies the structure of interaction and the associated payoffs, and the equilibrium logic is derived via backward induction.

The model yields a clear implication: under the specified preference ordering, both sides converge on passive-aggressive behaviour as the outcome that maximises attainable payoffs while limiting the risks of uncontrolled escalation. Substantively, the results account for the empirical regularity of reciprocal demonstrations of presence– naval manoeuvres, air and maritime incidents, and other forms of harassment or signalling–that allow each government to project resolve and defend reputational claims without crossing the threshold into direct military confrontation.

By providing a transparent strategic rationale for this “managed tension” equilibrium, the article contributes to a more precise understanding of why the Aegean dispute persists and why crisis dynamics often stabilise at the level of chronic, low-intensity rivalry rather than culminating in full escalation.

This article examines the impact of the Syrian crisis on the Syrian Armenian community against the backdrop of the shifting power configuration in the Middle East. The Syrian conflict is conceptualised as a proxy war involving major external and regional actors (Russia, the United States, Türkiye, Iran, and Israel) and competing approaches to conflict management. Particular emphasis is placed on the turning point associated with Russia’s military intervention in autumn 2015, which altered the battlefield balance and contributed to the emergence of negotiation tracks, including the Astana process, as well as to the subsequent stabilisation of large parts of Syria.

The study focuses on Syrian Armenians as one of the region’s oldest and most institutionally developed communities, suddenly drawn into areas of intense fighting. Using a systemic approach combined with constructivist sensitivity to ethnic identity, the article analyses how violence, displacement, and targeted attacks affected community structures, demography, and the prospects for preserving Armenian identity. It argues that the war resulted in severe demographic decline–reported as a reduction from roughly 80,000 to about 10,000 Armenians in Syria–alongside the destruction of communal infrastructure and heightened threats to physical security.

A central part of the analysis concerns Armenia’s policy response: maintaining diplomatic presence in Syria, supporting humanitarian relief, and coordinating with the Russian Federation. The article documents key quantitative indicators, including the relocation of approximately 22,000 Syrian Armenians to Armenia, the delivery of over 300 tons of humanitarian aid in 2016-2017, and the work of Armenia’s humanitarian mission in Aleppo since 2019 (nine rotations; more than 1.2 million sq. m demined; around 580 explosive devices neutralised; medical assistance provided to over 50,000 residents).

Finally, the article addresses the “new geopolitical realities” following the change of power in Syria in December 2024 and Armenia’s establishment of official contacts with the new authorities in 2025. The findings suggest that Armenia’s diplomatic posture and the operational humanitarian track – implemented in coordination with Russia – functioned as an important mechanism for mitigating humanitarian risks and sustaining minimum conditions for the community’s continued existence and identity preservation.

This article examines the origins and early operations of the world’s first Islamic bank—the Local Savings Banks initiative, widely known as the Mit Ghamr Bank. Mit Ghamr is notable not only for translating core principles of Islamic finance into workable institutional practice, but also for anticipating key features of socially oriented microfinance: it operationalized “banking for the poor” roughly two decades before the establishment of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. The first branch opened in July 1963 in the Egyptian town of Mit Ghamr under the leadership of Ahmad al-Naggar, a young economist and entrepreneur influenced by the West German savings bank model. The Mit Ghamr experiment marked an important turning point in the provision of financial services in developing contexts, combining interest-free financial instruments with a development-oriented approach to mobilizing savings and allocating capital that was closely attuned to the socio-cultural environment of its clients. Al-Naggar’s contribution consisted not only in devising practical mechanisms for non-interest-based finance, but also in articulating a coherent economic justification for their adoption, emphasizing prospective benefits for both the state and depositors. Special attention is devoted to the longstanding debate over whether Mit Ghamr should be classified as an “Islamic bank,” given its significant institutional and operational differences from contemporary Islamic banks in both Muslim-majority and non-Muslim settings. The article argues that today’s Islamic banking should be understood as one stage in the continuing evolution of Islamic finance rather than its final form. It concludes that the Mit Ghamr experience remains analytically and practically relevant for contemporary financial institutions, whether operating on interest-based or interest-free principles.

This article analyses how the memory of Uzbek Jadid reformers is reworked and mobilized in contemporary Uzbekistan as part of the state-sponsored metanarrative of the “Third Renaissance” and the “New Uzbekistan”. It examines (1) the core semantics of the political narrative about the Jadids, (2) the actors and institutional channels that produce and circulate this narrative, and (3) the ways in which a “reinvented” Jadid past is translated into commemorative policy and practices.
Methodologically, the study combines narrative research and memory studies, focusing on the interaction between political storytelling, academic historiography, and memorial governance. The empirical base includes public statements of the Uzbek political leadership, memorial legislation and policy documents (with particular attention to the expanding regulatory and institutional infrastructure of memory), as well as Uzbek historical scholarship on Jadidism since the early 2000s.
The article shows that the dominant official reading of Jadidism foregrounds its reformist and “democratic” potential, presenting it as a culturally rooted yet innovation-oriented model of non-Western modernization. Within this framework, Jadid “ancestors” are positioned as initiators of a renaissance interrupted by the Soviet period but continued in the 21st century through contemporary reforms; this narrative is further personalized by depicting the current head of state as a “neo-Jadid” and is reinforced by affective idioms of “blood”, “spiritual strength”, and the “energy of generations”. The “useful past” thus functions as a legitimacy resource for sovereign statehood and national identity-building, while extensive state efforts – ranging from institutional support for Jadidology to museums, memorial sites, educational initiatives and digital platforms – stabilize the narrative in both law and public space. Finally, the article argues that portraying Jadidism as the most successful non-Western reform project draws a tangible symbolic boundary between Uzbekistan as “the East” and an imagined “West”, even as the renaissance vocabulary itself remains rooted in Western conceptual heritage.

Russia’s regions have been required to operate under heightened external and internal constraints, including intensified sanctions pressure and persistent interregional disparities in socio-economic development. Under these conditions, strengthening the performance incentives of regional executive authorities becomes a practical governance task. This article develops an approach to performance-linked remuneration for regional civil servants and tests it on the case of the Republic of Bashkortostan.

Methodologically, the study proceeds in three steps. First, it constructs an integrated index of regional socio-economic development with an environmental component, based on official statistical data and a system of six sub-indices aligned with major ministerial responsibility areas. Second, it uses Kohonen self-organising maps to cluster Russian regions, enabling benchmarking within more homogeneous groups and identifying Bashkortostan’s position in the cluster structure for 2015 and 2020–2022. Third, it links collective and individual bonus payments to measured outcomes through a game-theoretic mechanism based on a modified optimal-contract framework that accounts for the institutional specifics of public administration and incorporates budget balance as a constraint on incentive design.

The empirical results (i) map the centre–periphery pattern of regional performance, (ii) locate Bashkortostan within the national cluster configuration, and (iii) compute the size of performance-based bonus payments for the region’s executive authorities for 2022 under the proposed rules. The article’s contribution lies in adapting optimal-contract logic to the meso-level of public administration and in combining index-based performance measurement, cluster benchmarking, and incentive design in a single applied framework. The proposed approach can be implemented as a modular algorithm for calculating performance-linked bonuses, subject to data availability and further calibration to regional institutional arrangements.

This article analyzes the foreign-policy risks arising from the cross-border interconnectedness (inter-system integration) of Russia’s electric power system and the country’s institutional and technological adaptation to these risks. The analysis applies a contemporary conception of energy security as “low vulnerability of vital energy systems,” operationalized through the questions “security for whom, of which values, and from what threats.” Methodologically, the study integrates a multidisciplinary framework with conceptual analysis, qualitative case studies, and elements of network modeling (community detection, betweenness centrality). Empirically, it examines three connectivity vectors: the European (BRELL desynchronization and the islanding of the Kaliningrad subsystem), the Eurasian (Central Asian transformations, the emerging EAEU common electricity market, and North–South projects), and the Eastern (exports to China, technology cooperation, and prospective Caspian and Middle Eastern corridors), alongside cross-cutting risks such as sanctions, cyber threats, and warfare/sabotage. The findings highlight the dual nature of interconnection: while scale and mutual support enhance technical resilience, interties simultaneously create channels of political coercion and cascading failures. Vulnerabilities are differentiated across referent objects (state, regions, sectoral segments) and values (supply reliability, economic efficiency, geopolitical influence). Russia’s adaptation portfolio includes strengthening the autonomy of critical nodes (islanding, redundancy), institutionalizing connectivity within “friendly” formats (EAEU; south- and east-bound interconnections), diversifying partners and reducing import dependence in key technologies, and reinforcing cyber and physical protection of critical infrastructure. The theoretical contribution lies in refining the vulnerability framework for a large multi-node system; the practical contribution is in substantiating a balance between integration and insulation as a principle of connectivity-risk management under geopolitical turbulence.

The European Union’s post-2027 agenda raises a deceptively simple question: where will the money come from? The problem has acquired new urgency since the European Commission’s July 2025 proposal for the 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework – envisaging a substantially larger envelope (around €2 trillion), greater budgetary flexibility, and additional revenue sources–has reopened distributional conflicts over who pays, who benefits, and under what rules. Moving beyond a purely economic reading, this article frames revenue reform as an institutional choice embedded in the EU’s quasi-federal system of multilevel economic governance and revisits the usefulness – and limits – of first-generation fiscal federalism for interpreting the Union’s evolving fiscal architecture.
The analysis is motivated by the fiscal afterlife of NextGenerationEU. Although conceived as an off-budget instrument, interest payments are charged to the EU’s current budget, while principal repayment–up to €338 billion linked to grants and the reinforcement of existing programs via externally assigned revenue–will enter the EU budget as a direct expenditure item from 2028 to 2058, sharpening the political necessity of reshaping the revenue side. 
Against this background, the article identifies the obstacles that continue to prevent a shift towards tax-based “own resources”, and it evaluates the plausibility of alternative trajectories, including a more explicit reliance on common debt. 
It does so through a structured examination of the EU’s existing own-resources system and the Commission’s successive reform packages (2021–2025), paying particular attention to proposals that seek to create more autonomous revenue streams–such as reallocating 30 per cent of EU ETS auction revenues and 75 per cent of CBAM proceeds to the EU level–while recognizing the political constraints that have repeatedly stalled agreement in the Council. Drawing on EU primary law and official documentation, alongside expert debates on EU taxing powers and fiscal integration, the article argues that–customs duties aside–the Union still lacks a comprehensive own-resources system that is genuinely autonomous from member-state budgets.

The core implication is that the EU’s future revenue strategy is likely to remain a politically contested mix of national contributions, tightly circumscribed “tax-like” resources linked to sectoral policies, and carefully designed borrowing instruments whose long-term stabilization remains uncertain.

This article assesses whether abandoning consensus in the Council of Ministers has, in practice, accelerated EU law-making. Institutional reforms in the 1990s–2000s pursued two partly competing objectives: strengthening legitimacy by empowering the European Parliament and improving efficiency by expanding the scope for qualified majority voting (QMV) in the Council. Against the widespread expectation that QMV should shorten legislative duration, the article asks whether Council voting by qualified majority continues to have an independent accelerating effect once the EU’s evolving institutional environment is taken seriously. The analysis draws on an original dataset of EU directives and regulations adopted as secondary law under the ordinary legislative procedure and the consultation procedure between 1994 and 2019 (N = 2,546). Crucially, unlike most earlier studies that infer Council decision rules from treaty legal bases, the dataset codes the actual decision method in the Council – distinguishing between de jure QMV adopted by consensus and de jure QMV adopted by recorded vote – using Council monthly reports and voting records where necessary.

Methodologically, the article combines descriptive evidence (box plots and moving averages) with survival analysis (a Cox proportional hazards model), allowing the effect of the Council’s decision method to be separated from other determinants of legislative duration and from cross-procedure heterogeneity. The results qualify conventional accounts of “efficiency gains” from replacing unanimity with QMV. Under the ordinary legislative procedure, acts adopted by consensus are, on average, completed faster than acts adopted by qualified-majority vote – consistent with the interpretation that consensus more often reflects low underlying preference dispersion among member states, whereas recourse to voting signals deeper disagreement and more costly bargaining.

Under the consultation procedure, by contrast, mandatory unanimity substantially slows adoption compared with the legal possibility of QMV; yet where QMV is legally available, there is no meaningful difference between adoption by recorded vote and adoption by “voluntary” consensus, underscoring the continued relevance of the Council’s consensus-seeking practices.

Taken together, the findings suggest that the efficiency dividend from extending QMV has been more limited than often assumed, while the empowerment of the European Parliament has imposed larger time costs on EU law-making. The practical scope for further accelerating legislation through additional departures from consensus therefore appears constrained, which has implications for debates on the EU’s capacity to deliver policy under conditions of expanding responsibilities and heightened legitimacy requirements.

This article examines the ideological and political evolution of Germany’s Alliance 90/The Greens from an explicitly pacifist “peace party” into a political actor that legitimizes— and, in government, actively supports—the use of military instruments for humanitarian and security objectives. The analysis combines a chronological reading of the party’s core program documents and election manifestos with an examination of key episodes of political practice, allowing the study to trace how normative self-descriptions (“non-violence”, “culture of restraint”, “primacy of international law”) align—or fail to align—with concrete policy choices.
Methodologically, the study relies on retrospective and systems analysis and treats the party’s positions on war and peace as embedded in Germany’s broader institutional and alliance context (EU, NATO, UN) and in the Greens’ own transition from movement party to governing actor. The article shows that the decisive practical break with pacifism occurred earlier than its doctrinal codification: while the Greens de facto crossed the threshold in 1998–1999 by endorsing NATO’s Kosovo intervention and subsequently supporting deployments such as Afghanistan, they continued for years to preserve a peacemaker identity in programmatic language and public rhetoric. In the 2010s and especially the 2020s, this gap narrowed: by the 2017 program the party’s view of NATO had shifted markedly, and the 2020 Principles and the 2021 manifesto further normalized a security role for the Bundeswehr in multilateral missions. 
The article argues that the Ukraine conflict and the Greens’ participation in the 2021–2025 “traffic light” coalition accelerated and consolidated this transformation. Under the banner of defending human rights, resisting “authoritarian aggression”, and strengthening European security, the party’s leadership promoted policies aimed at enhancing Germany’s and NATO’s military capabilities, elevating the Bundeswehr’s role in external crisis management, and broadening the political acceptability of arms deliveries and their use in conflict settings. After moving into opposition following the early federal election of 2025, the Greens largely retained this confrontational security posture, indicating a structural rather than situational shift. Overall, the article concludes that Alliance 90/The Greens have moved from a pacifist identity anchored in non-violence to a defensive–confrontational paradigm in foreign and security policy, with significant implications for Germany’s strategic culture and the future of “green” politics in Europe.

Book review: D.V. Streltsov et al. 2025. ‘New Cold War’ in Asia. Global and regional dimension. Moscow: Publishing House «Aspect-Press».