This article examines how emotions are conceptualized and mobilized in the foreign policy of the European Union. Starting from the affective turn in the social sciences, the author reviews scholarship that treats the EU as both a normative actor and a potential “emotional actor.” The focus is not emotions as individual states, but emotional norms: socially expected affective responses to violations of political, legal, or moral norms. The article asks which areas of EU foreign policy have been studied through this lens, what methods and theories researchers use, and whether collective emotions can anticipate EU decisions.

The analysis covers studies of genocide recognition, security, armed conflicts, migration, European identity, climate policy, and sanctions, and compares their conclusions with opinion surveys in EU member states in 2022–2025. Special attention is paid to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Israel’s military operation in Gaza, and the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over NagornoKarabakh. The article shows that EU institutions seek to create a supranational emotional community, or emotional regime, in which member states share a common understanding of norms, their violation, and the need for collective action.

The findings are ambivalent. In the case of Ukraine, fear, insecurity, anger, sympathy, and solidarity have helped legitimize sanctions, humanitarian assistance, support for refugees, and stronger defense cooperation, although public support varies across countries and declines when the costs of solidarity increase, especially regarding arms deliveries and EU accession. The Gaza case demonstrates that bottom-up emotional mobilization does not necessarily produce an equally coherent EU response. The Nagorno-Karabakh case reveals weaker emotional resonance and highlights pragmatic constraints, including energy dependence and geopolitical interests.

The article concludes that emotions matter because they participate in the construction, interpretation, hierarchy, and enforcement of norms. Yet the EU lacks a unified emotional regime: collective reactions remain uneven and politically selective. Fear and insecurity increasingly push the Union from the identity of a peaceful normative project toward that of a geopolitical actor with a military component. Monitoring public opinion is therefore useful for predicting shifts in EU foreign policy, but only when national differences, norm hierarchies, and the costs of solidarity are taken into account.

This article examines European Union science diplomacy as an instrument of external action aimed at strengthening the EU’s international actorness, strategic autonomy, and technological sovereignty. It argues that EU science diplomacy is undergoing a significant transformation: from a liberal-normative model centered on international scientific cooperation, soft power, and global public goods toward a more strategic and geopolitical model shaped by technological competition, security concerns, and the fragmentation of the international order.

The article identifies the conceptual and institutional foundations of EU science diplomacy and assesses their role in the broader evolution of EU foreign policy. Methodologically, the study is grounded in institutionalism, which allows science diplomacy to be analyzed as a developing system of norms, strategic documents, organizational structures, expert networks, and practices formed under the auspices of the European Commission. The empirical basis includes European Commission documents, reports of EU working groups on science diplomacy, materials related to Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe, initiatives of the EU Science Diplomacy Alliance, and relevant academic literature.

The article examines two contrasting cases: the SESAME synchrotron project in Jordan and scientific cooperation in the Arctic. SESAME illustrates the liberal logic of “science for diplomacy,” where research infrastructure is expected to promote dialogue and confidence-building in a conflict-prone region. The Arctic case, by contrast, shows science diplomacy as a tool of strategic positioning in a region where scientific knowledge is closely linked to climate governance, natural resources, security, sanctions, and geopolitical rivalry.

The article concludes that EU science diplomacy can no longer be understood solely as a form of soft power or international cooperation. It is increasingly becoming a mechanism for consolidating the EU’s geopolitical subjectivity, technological sovereignty, and strategic autonomy in a fragmented world order.

This article examines national patterns in Western European newspaper coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. While the crisis has traditionally been studied through the actions of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba, its perception in allied but non-participant European states remains less explored. The article addresses this gap by comparing how leading newspapers in the United Kingdom, France, and Spain represented one of the most dangerous episodes of the Cold War to their national audiences.

The study is based on a content analysis of 493 publications from six major newspapers: The Guardian and The Telegraph in the United Kingdom, Le Monde and Le Figaro in France, and ABC and La Vanguardia Española in Spain. The chronological scope covers the period from 16 October to 31 December 1962, making it possible to analyze both the peak of the crisis and its post-crisis interpretation. The research examines authorship, genre structure, visual presentation, source base, representation of the positions of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba, and the rhetorical devices used to shape readers’ perceptions.

The findings show that Western European newspapers largely reproduced the American narrative of the crisis, reflecting the logic of bloc solidarity in the bipolar international system. At the same time, the study reveals significant national differences in editorial strategies. British newspapers adopted a rational-critical approach: while generally supporting Washington, they also provided space for public debate and criticism of the Kennedy administration. French newspapers approached the crisis through an institutional and analytical lens, emphasizing the role of international organizations, especially the United Nations, and the implications of the crisis for European security. Spanish newspapers, operating under Francoist censorship and shaped by the regime’s anti-communist orientation, offered the most expressive and ideologically charged coverage, portraying Cuba and Fidel Castro in sharply negative terms. The article argues that Western European press coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis was structured by a “solidarity–sovereignty” dichotomy. European newspapers demonstrated solidarity with the United States as the leading power of the Western bloc, yet their coverage also reflected national political cultures, historical experiences, and foreign policy priorities. This comparative perspective contributes to the study of Cold War media by showing how allied European societies interpreted global nuclear confrontation through their own national frameworks.

This article examines China’s health diplomacy as an increasingly important component of its foreign policy strategy and global political positioning. The COVID-19 pandemic, by securitizing public health and exposing the geopolitical dimension of medical assistance, substantially increased the relevance of health diplomacy as a sphere in which states pursue national interests, cultivate international legitimacy, and compete for influence. The People’s Republic of China represents one of the most significant cases in this regard, since Beijing has described its pandemic-era assistance as the largest medical aid operation in the country’s history.

The article traces the evolution of China’s approach to health diplomacy from the early use of medical teams in the developing world to the contemporary Health Silk Road, one of the specialized dimensions of the Belt and Road Initiative. The study argues that China’s health diplomacy has entered a new stage characterized by pragmatism, the combined use of soft and hard power, an emphasis on South–South cooperation and appeals to moral responsibility. These features are conceptualized as health diplomacy with Chinese characteristics.

The theoretical framework draws on public diplomacy, soft power, geopolitical interpretations of vaccine diplomacy, and Chinese foreign policy concepts, including Mao Zedong’s theory of the three worlds, Hu Jintao’s idea of China as a responsible global power, Xi Jinping’s concept of a community with a shared future for mankind, and Yan Xuetong’s moral realism. The empirical basis includes Chinese white papers, documents related to the Health Silk Road, official statements, WHO materials, vaccine and health expenditure trackers, statistics, expert reports, media publications, and academic literature.

The article shows that China used the COVID-19 pandemic both to present itself as a responsible global power capable of contributing to the management of a worldwide crisis and to gain economic and political benefits. However, Beijing was unable to fully transform these opportunities into sustainable international leadership. Its health diplomacy faces external constraints, including geopolitical rivalry with the United States, distrust toward Chinese intentions, and criticism of vaccine and mask diplomacy, as well as internal limitations related to China’s own healthcare system, transparency deficits, and the absence of a comprehensive global health strategy.

The article concludes that China is not yet ready to achieve and maintain leadership in global health diplomacy. Nevertheless, the institutionalization of the Health Silk Road, regional coalition-building, and the integration of health diplomacy into China’s broader foreign policy strategy suggest that health diplomacy will remain an important instrument through which Beijing seeks to strengthen its international position and influence global health governance.

This article examines the role of Chinese diaspora capital in the economic development of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 2023. It focuses on the business activity of overseas Chinese, or huaqiao-huaren, as a source of foreign direct investment, export expansion, employment creation, tax revenues, and technological upgrading. The study aims to assess the scale and significance of overseas Chinese direct investment in the PRC and to compare it with investment flows from foreign and Taiwanese investors.

The article reconstructs several stages in the development of overseas Chinese business in China. In 1949–1965, huaqiao capital was channeled mainly into state and state-private enterprises, priority industrial projects, and agriculture, but its potential was constrained by the socialist transformation of private capital. During the Cultural Revolution, investment flows virtually ceased as trust between the PRC and the diaspora collapsed. After the launch of reform and opening-up in 1978, overseas Chinese regained the status of privileged investors and became one of the main sources of FDI, especially in export-oriented, labor-intensive manufacturing. In 1992–2007, their investment expanded sharply, while in 2008–2023 it shifted increasingly toward capital-intensive and high-technology sectors.

Methodologically, the article draws on Chinese and international statistics, legal documents, scholarly literature, and existing methods for estimating overseas Chinese investment. It also proposes an updated approach for assessing direct investment by the Chinese diaspora in the contemporary period, taking into account the changing roles of Hong Kong, Macao, offshore jurisdictions, Southeast Asia, the United States, and other centers of Chinese diaspora capital. According to the author’s calculations, the Chinese diaspora invested approximately USD 2.03 trillion in the PRC between 1949 and 2023, accounting for about 68 percent of accumulated FDI. By contrast, overseas Chinese investment in Taiwan over the comparable period amounted to only USD 4.46 billion. The article argues that, in the long term, the PRC became the clear winner in the competition with Taiwan for diaspora capital, although this outcome was not predetermined. In the context of the US-China trade war and the withdrawal of some Western investors, overseas Chinese capital remains a key resource for China’s high-technology development and may increasingly replace departing Western capital.

This article examines the role of the International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC) in the reorientation of Russia’s foreign trade flows toward the countries of the Global South. In the context of sanctions pressure, geopolitical fragmentation, and the restructuring of traditional logistics chains, the INSTC has acquired strategic importance as an alternative transport artery linking Russia with the Caspian region, Iran, India, Central Asia, and wider Asian and African markets. However, the article argues that there remains a significant gap between the declared potential of the corridor and its actual cargo base. This gap is shaped not only by infrastructure constraints, but also by administrative, legal, tariff, logistical, and trade-structural barriers.

The purpose of the study is to systematize the key barriers to the development of the INSTC on the basis of Russia’s trade cooperation with countries gravitating toward the corridor’s routes. The empirical analysis focuses on the dynamics and commodity structure of Russia’s trade in 2019–2024 with Azerbaijan, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. The article shows that the growth of Russia’s trade with these partners is highly asymmetric. Russian exports have expanded much faster than imports, while a significant share of export growth is driven by raw materials, especially mineral fuels, oil, and petroleum products. These goods do not automatically generate stable demand for the corridor’s multimodal infrastructure, since large-scale energy exports continue to rely mainly on traditional maritime routes. The study identifies several groups of barriers limiting the corridor’s effectiveness. The most important hard infrastructure constraints include the unfinished Rasht–Astara railway section in Iran, limited capacity and ageing fleet on the Caspian route, insufficient port and rail infrastructure, and the shallowing of the Caspian Sea and the Volga–Caspian shipping canal. These are compounded by soft barriers: fragmented legal regulation, complex customs procedures, the absence of a coordinated through tariff, weak logistics management, lack of a single coordination center, and information gaps among business actors.

The article concludes that the INSTC cannot be developed only through isolated infrastructure projects. Its potential depends on comprehensive modernization of logistics governance, digital coordination of cargo flows, harmonization of tariff and customs procedures, development of return cargo, and broader diversification of Russia’s southern trade. Without these measures, growing trade with the Global South will not necessarily translate into sustainable cargo flows through the corridor.

This article explores the role of identity in shaping and legitimizing the multivector foreign policies of the Central Asian states. Since gaining independence, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have consistently presented multi-vectorism as a core principle of their external action, embedding it in official doctrines, strategic documents, and diverse formats of international cooperation. Yet the actual structure of their political, security, trade, investment, and migration ties reveals the continued predominance of Russia and China as the region’s principal partners. This creates a gap between the declared pluralism of foreign policy and the real hierarchy of external relations.

The article uses the concept of identity to explain this discrepancy and assesses whether identity discourse can serve as an instrument for promoting and legitimizing a multi-vector foreign policy course. It argues that Central Asia’s identity landscape is highly complex and multilayered. It includes primordial forms of belonging rooted in family, clan, tribe, locality, and regional solidarities; national identity shaped by post-Soviet nation-building; Islamic identity, whose influence is growing but remains uneven across the region; post-imperial and post-Soviet identity linked to language, memory, and shared historical experience; and pan-identities, especially Eurasian and Turkic, promoted through regional integration projects.
The article concludes that this multidimensional identity matrix both enables and constrains multi-vectorism. On the one hand, it provides political elites with symbolic resources for balancing among external partners and avoiding exclusive alignment with any single center of power. On the other hand, the coexistence of partially competing identities limits the state’s ability to construct one dominant identity as the foundation of a stable foreign policy vector. Identity discourse can therefore help justify and reproduce multi-vector foreign policy, but it cannot fully determine or consolidate it.

This article examines the Afghan crisis after the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021 and its impact on regional security in Central Asia. Afghanistan is closely linked to the Central Asian states geographically, historically, ethnically, politically, and economically; therefore, instability in Afghanistan directly affects the security environment of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The Taliban takeover created new risks related to terrorism, religious extremism, drug trafficking, organized crime, illegal migration, and the potential spillover of violence across Afghanistan’s northern borders.

The study uses a qualitative case-study approach and focuses on the period from 2021 to 2025. It draws on scholarly literature, analytical reports, and policy studies produced by international organizations, regional security bodies, and research institutes. The article first provides a historical overview of the Afghan crisis, tracing its roots from the political upheavals of the 1970s and the Soviet intervention to the rise of the Taliban and the post-2021 security situation. It then analyzes the main channels through which the Afghan crisis affects Central Asia.

Special attention is paid to terrorist and extremist groups operating in Afghanistan, including ISIS-K, Al-Qaeda-linked networks, and regional militant organizations, as well as to narcotics production and trafficking along the Northern Route. The article argues that the Afghan crisis has intensified existing vulnerabilities in Central Asia, including weak border management, socio-economic pressures, ethnic tensions, and limited coordination among regional security institutions.

The article concludes that Central Asian states cannot address these threats separately. A more resilient regional security architecture requires intelligence-sharing, counterterrorism coordination, stronger border control, pragmatic diplomatic engagement with Afghanistan, and joint counter-radicalization programs.

This review examines Vladimir Padrino López’s book Multipolar Geopolitics: 20 Years After April 13 as a political and strategic reflection on the transition from a unipolar world order to an emerging multipolar, or more precisely tripolar, configuration of global power. The book is interpreted not as an academic treatise, but as a geopolitical diagnosis written from the perspective of a state located at the intersection of resource competition, external pressure, and the struggle for sovereignty. The review shows that Padrino López places Venezuela’s experience within a broader transformation of international relations, where sovereignty is no longer merely a legal principle but a condition of survival and strategic autonomy.

Particular attention is paid to several key themes of the book: the erosion of the unipolar order, the return of territory and strategic geography to global politics, the growing significance of artificial intelligence as a factor of power, and the author’s concept of four “umbrellas” of state power — nuclear capability, economic and financial capacity, energy resources, and technological superiority. The review also analyzes Padrino López’s idea of tripolarity, centered on the United States, Russia, and China, as a more accurate description of the current international system than the broader and less specific notion of multipolarity.
The authors emphasize the relevance of the book for understanding Latin American geopolitical thought, which differs from Western traditions of power projection. In this perspective, strength is understood not primarily as the capacity to dominate others, but as the ability to avoid becoming an object of external will. The review concludes that Padrino López’s work should be read as a warning about the costs of preserving global dominance in a changing world and as a contribution to the intellectual tradition of Latin American resistance, sovereignty, and regional autonomy.