The article contributes to the historical literature on the Berlin Congress; it shows the events of the summer of 1878 through the eyes of the diplomats of the defeated Otto man Empire. The primary source for the article is the “Rapport” by the head of the Turkish delegation to the Сongress, Alexander Karathéodori Pasha (1833–1906), a Phanariote with Greek and Bulgarian roots, the son of the personal physician of Sultan Mahmud II and the first Ottoman lawyer. He graduated from the Sorbonne law faculty with a doctorate in law. Until recently, Turkish historians wrote about him more as a diplomat. However, in recent years, they started to pay attention to his extraordinary fate, the history of his family, in which there were many famous Phanariots. “Rapport” only in recent years began to attract the at tention of historians. The history of its creation is still unclear. It contains fascinating details of the relationship between representatives of a collective Europe at that time, the nature of their interests, and factors that outlined the fate of the Balkan region for decades to come. The report was written by Ottoman dignitaries when the Balkans finally became a “border area.” Its author noticed how the “big players” ’s geopolitical contradictions pushed the local people’s historical evolution along the “path” of future cataclysms. Alexander Karathéodori Pasha conveys, through seemingly minor details, the discord between the representatives of the “collective West” “and their desire to stop the attempts of the Ottoman Empire to follow the European paradigm of development. Against the background of the events in Berlin, Karathéodori eased the participants’ desires to start the quickest part of the “Ottoman inheritance” and drew attention to the beginning process of restructuring of international relations. He viewed the Berlin Congress analytically and realized its long-term implications.

In February 1948, during the political crisis in Czechoslovakia was established a communist regime. This event completed the formation of the Soviet bloc in Europe. It directly impacted the US containment policy towards the USSR and the escalation of the Cold War. Based on archival documents and newspapers articles, the research studies these events through their perception by American media and diplomats, whose opinions and interpretations had great and decisive importance for the US public opinion and its government official reaction. The author concludes that the Czechoslovak crisis of 1948 aroused considerable interest and severe reaction in the United States. It was considered as a part of growing Soviet-American contradictions and international tension. Despite the fears of a communist coup in Czechoslovakia expressed back in 1947, American experts could not accurately predict the onset time of the crisis and its nature. The rapidity of the crisis, the Communist’s reaction, and decisiveness, lack of direct Soviet intervention, as well as the absence of democratic resistance, became a surprise for American journalists and diplomats. They believed that the communist takeover was a manifestation of Soviet expansion and the Kremlin’s desire to consolidate its control over all Eastern Europe. Despite the external legitimacy, the transfer of power to the left forces was interpreted as a coup d'état that final ized the establishment of the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, the US government refused to sever diplomatic relations with Prague and to initiate an international investigation. Washington found no direct evidence of Soviet intervention. It had to accept the changes in Czechoslovakia, focusing its forces on the inadmissibility of this scenario in Western Europe. The crisis directly influenced the adoption of the Marshall Plan and the intensification of the containment policy.

The article studies the collapse of Rzeczpospolita and the admission of its parts into the Russian and Austrian Empires to understand through the institutionalist approach the consequences of reformatting the geopolitical space, namely, implantation of the debris of the collapsed society into another social system. It reveals the mechanisms of the fusion of donor and recipient societies. They include unification – the integration of new territories into the legal and administrative-territorial organization of the acceptor country. This mechanism proceeds through several stages: initial, implying the creation of hybrid institutions (implementation of the new authorities into the pre-existing system of power); secondary, when the institutional transplants are rebuilt with the simultaneous foundation of intermediate institutions); final (the ultimate restructuring of power following the new model). A vital instrument of unification is constituted by estate homogenization or the alignment of the social organization of the new lands and the acceptor society. Besides, among the mechanisms of integration, there are 

• conditionality (positive, or stimulating, for extending the social base of transformations as well as negative, intended to curb resentment), 
• substitution (admission of representatives of the acceptor society to the higher estate of the new lands),
• socialization (measures to culturally homogenize the united social system). 

Despite the similarity of the employed mechanisms, there is a difference in the integration models applied by the Russian and Austrian Empires, which is due to the specificities of the state organization and national structure of these empires as well as the geographical location and the level of economic development of the acquired territories. The distinctive feature of the Russian approach to homogenization of the new lands with the rest of the empire was transplantation of economic, political, and social-cultural institutions to the acquired territories with preservation of some pre-existing endemic economic institutions. The Austrian policy was haracterized by asymmetrical and limited institutional transplantations (only political institutions) to the new province, which turned the region into a virtual inner colony. The meaning of the chosen integration model for the later development of the integrated lands is also discussed.

The features of the formation of the of the state explains the high level of interest in this scientific problem in the modern theory of international relations. The study of for eign policy identity is capable of providing an understanding of the policy-making activity of the state and its positioning in the international arena. The process of forming a foreign policy identity linked to both objective and subjective factors. The objective factors should be classified as geographical, historical, cultural and religious, the key subjective factors can be considered the role of a leader. This factor is standard for Middle Eastern states, especially for Egypt, where there are traditions of strong centralized powers. Egyptian leaders have supreme power in foreign policy decisions within the framework of the political system. Egypt's foreign policy is often determined by the personal character traits of the country's leaders. This article aims to study the role of the head of the Egypt in the search for foreign policy identity in the context of an identity crisis at the national level. Egypt has a long history of authoritarian rule, because it is impossible to separate national identity from foreign policy identity. Since its independent existence, each period with its own context established a different framework of identity and worldview for decision-makers in the field of Egypt`s foreign policy. The predominance of various elements in ideological as well as worldview in the age of the rule of a particular president has led to noticeable differences in Egypt's foreign policy at the current stage. This article attempts to answer the following research questions: What place does of the institute of the heads of State in foreign policy decisions? How leader's influence does determine the foreign policy role of the state? What changes in foreign policy priorities have taken place during the analysis period? What are the reasons for the differences between the main periods of Egypt's foreign policy in goals, tools and approaches to the outside world? The author comes to the conclusion that the change of the political leader plays an important role in the transformations of Egypt's foreign policy. The article analyzes the main trends in the foreign policy self-perception of Egypt in order to confirm the hypothesis that the foreign policy identity of Egypt had not evolved a discontinuity even in the conditions of dramatic events, whether it is the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Peace treaty with Israel or the events of the Arab Spring.

Civil identity is one of the most significant factors in modern political practice. Today’s identity formation and development of large national groups is less based on a cultural and historical foundation and increasingly depends on political technologies. Among them, the construction of new languages plays an important role. The article studies the Bosnian language policy, which, contrary to forming a common civil identity, as a result of the politicization of linguistic norms becomes a factor in creating a “forge of hatred”. Drawing on constructivist social theories, the author summarizes Bosnian linguistic practices and examines them through the prism of symbolic interactionism and negative feedback systems. Particular attention is paid to situations when the desire for effective communication motivates speakers to abandon ethnically colored linguistic markers and situations in which the language acts as a defense against the internal “other.” Applying the criteria for distinguishing between language and dialects, the author concludes that the phonetic principle of the Serbo-Croatian language formation made it possible, after the destruction of Yugoslavia, to turn this linguistic continuum into an identification weapon to delimit the citizens of one country. This experience helps analyze the politicization of literary interpretations and linguistic norms in other regions of the world, where there are also examples of the growth of xenophobia, nationalism, and intolerance resulting from a differentiating language policy.

The article explores scientific discourse on the phenomenon of state fragility and reviews contemporary research that aims to uncover what factors account for the emergence of states that are vulnerable to risks and crises and lack the capacity to deliver a response on their own. In order to achieve this goal, the author analyzes the evolution of the state fragility concept and reviews the literature on its causes. The article finds significant advancement in scientific thought about fragile states, acknowledg ing their continuous and multi-dimensional nature (the 'ALC' and 'OECD' approaches). However, these approaches tend to view fragile states as a deviation from the Europe an nation-state model and focus more on the attributes of fragility (inability to perform core functions of the state or lacking the capacity to cope with risks and crises) while failing to produce a precise explanation for its causes. Hence, there is a need to analyze the process of fragile states formation and its consequences, i.e., to look at the macrohistorical dimension of state fragility. A better understanding of the historical context of state fragility and stricter identification criteria for the subgroup of severely and chronically fragile states allows identifying some structural explanatory factors such as rigidity of pre-independence colonial state borders, heterogeneity of population, and preferences that constraints collective action and small economic size. The literature review presented in the article finds that fragile states often have an insufficient tax base to guarantee the efficient provision of public goods. There are also agency factors that contribute to increased state fragility. This review also finds that imperfect political institutions may produce kleptocratic political regimes detached from the population's interests and irresponsive to them. Consequently, they are likely to deny or limit access to public goods for some population groups. A combination of these factors is likely to create weak and fragile states, with the extent of fragility being context-specific. Recognizing the impact of the factors discussed in the article may help produce better policy responses to various development problems that plague fragile states.

Even though IR literature has accumulated a large amount of empirical data and knowledge in sanctions policy effectiveness, this problem remains contested: IR has failed yet to reach a consensus and elaborate the sanctions theory. The article reviews the variety of approaches to evaluating the effectiveness of the sanctions policy and explains why researchers have come to conflicting and mutually exclusive conclusions about the impact of various factors and conditions on the outcome of sanctions pressure. It argues that the disagreement is primarily rooted in different approaches to conceptualizing basic concepts – “sanctions” and “effectiveness”. This disagreement results in coding the same cases as successful and unsuccessful and presents an obstacle to obtaining similar results using statistical analysis. The main demarcation line goes between the realist and liberal understandings of sanctions as a foreign policy tool. This is reflected in the ongoing disputes between those who adhere to the idea of inflicting severe economic damage on the target country and supporters of targeted sanctions; between those who promote multilateral sanctions as capable of causing economic effects, or try to identify weaknesses of ad hoc coalitions, or see the only way to get the effect of sanctions in support from international organizations; between those who focus their research on the target country and those who are interested in pressure on the allies.

Book review: D.A. Maryasis. 2020. Innovative Economy as the Basis for Israel's Participation in the Modern System of International Economic Relations. Moscow: IV RAN. 428 p

Book review: Cörüt I., Jongerden J. (ed.). 2021. Beyond Nationalism and the Nation-State: Radical Approaches to Nation. Routledge. 226 p. ISBN 9780367684020