In recent years, Western governments have invoked the values of universal human rights to justify large-scale military operations. Critical theorists have often responded that these campaigns serve not to promote peace, stability, or prosperity, but to entrench Western economic and political power, often in ways that have been devastating for local populations. However, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine casts doubt on whether assumptions about Western dominance will continue to furnish adequate accounts of global armed conflict. Critical theorists base many of their views on what is sometimes called ‘memory politics’, meaning that they cite histories of Western militarism, colonialism, racism and economic exploitation as backdrops to current policies. In this article it is argued that they will only be able to explain a conflict like the Ukraine war with credibility by incorporating into their memory politics the left’s own histories of supporting autocratic regimes.

Under the early Qajars, Tabriz rose from being a provincial backwater in ruins to the foremost commercial entrepôt of Iran. Initially, its insignificant foreign trade was limited to Turkey (mostly raw Gilani silk), but, when the major commercial southern and western supply routes of Iran became unsafe and costly, trade moved to the northern route. Moreover, after Russia opened its territory to European goods in 1821, these also flowed via Tiflis to Tabriz. When ten years later Russia revoked this permission, the Tiflis trade moved to Tabriz via Trabzon, gradually replacing not only the Tiflis route but also the Istanbul-Erzerum route. This turned Trabzon into a quasi-“Iranian” port, as initially most of its imports were destined for or coming from Iran. Four-fifths of imports to Tabriz were European fabrics. Initially these had come from Russia, but, as of the 1820s, such were replaced by British, German, French, and Swiss fabrics. By mid-century, Manchester fabrics dominated the import trade of Tabriz. Thus, Great Britain took Russia's place as its primary trading partner, although by 1900 the tables had turned. During the majority of the nineteenth century, Caucasian Armenian merchants dominated Tabriz's foreign trade, with European merchants playing an important but limited role in the import of Manchester goods and the export of raw silk. After 1870, the importance of Tabriz as the commercial hub of N.W. Iran decreased, due to various reasons such as the outbreak of the Gilan silk disease, Russia stopping the transit of non-Russian goods, and the opening of the Suez Canal, but also because it became cheaper to import goods via Bushehr and Baghdad-Kermanshah. Nevertheless, even with a diminished role as a financial center and less foreign trade, Tabriz continued to be Iran's major commercial center until WW I.

Drawing on recent debates in English School (ES) theory, this article develops an analytical framework for examining how states use multilateral institutions, or what ES theorists call ‘secondary institutions’, to reshape ‘primary institutions’, i.e. fundamental practices in international society. The framework highlights the role of states’ agency in international institutional change by shedding light on strategies that they employ to bring about changes in primary institutions. It posits that, although they can seek to directly remould primary institutions, states in practice often seek to bring about primary institutional changes through existing or newly formed secondary institutions and that this is especially the case at the level of regional international societies (RISs). The article demonstrates the utility of the framework by using it to analyse the case of Russia’s peacekeeping policy in the post-Soviet regional international society (PSRIS), focusing on its efforts to institutionalise the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) as an alternative ‘peacekeeping’ actor.

The Bolsheviks’ world revolution encountered setbacks in the 1920s. Among the bloodiest of these was the massacre of 1927 when the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) entire central leadership was killed in the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (GMD) coup. Existing explanations highlight Moscow’s miscalculation, infighting within the Kremlin, Soviet advisers’ information dilemma, and the CCP leaders’ political inexperience. This article compares the opening stages of the Bolshevik (or Russian) and Chinese Communist Party revolutions to explain why the 1927 setback became a catastrophe. It argues that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 caused fundamental changes, which thwarted any attempt to replicate the 1917 victory in the post-1917 world. The CCP in 1927 faced three disadvantages that the Bolshevik Revolution had engendered: a misleading myth about the October Revolution, a Bolshevized system of repression created by Soviet advisers to the GMD, and the ‘red scare’ in Japan and British Southeast Asia, which blocked members of the CCP from escaping overseas. This article draws on leaders’ biographical materials to compare the two parties’ learning from foreign revolutions, records in suffering repression, and experiences as overseas refugees. The comparison shows that the Bolsheviks did not face these three disadvantages before 1917.

The authors provide a scholarly conspectus of comparative studies involving Russian, EU8 and EU15 Welfare Polities. They elaborate the notion of the ‘welfare polity’ and its potential for enhancing comparative studies of welfare institutions, policies and practices. This is accompanied by an overview of trends in comparative studies involving Russian, EU8 and EU15 countries, along with a consideration of how comparative research involving these states can be strengthened. Gaps in the literature and evidence base, including systematic cross-national and temporal data on the design and implementation of social policies and social protection, are highlighted. A shared concern was found with the growth of division and exclusion exacerbated by global economic factors and by state-level policy shifts, a trend especially notable in Russian studies. Fruitful pointers for future research and international collaboration are indicated and the need for further comparative efforts emphasised at a challenging time for geopolitical relations.

Russia’s Arctic policy since 2008 has been influenced by two competing foreign policy lines (discourses): the “Arctic as a resource base” and the “sovereignty discourse”. The “Arctic as a resource base” has been the dominant one since the first Russian Arctic Strategy in 2008. It is primarily about exploiting the vast oil and gas resources estimated to be located there, as well as turn the Northern Sea Route into a “global transport corridor”. In Russia’s Arctic Strategy of 2020, however, there is enhanced emphasis on sovereignty and power balancing in Russian Arctic policy. And the focus on sovereignty was heightened with the amendments to Russia’s Arctic Strategy in March 2023. This increased emphasis on sovereignty, territorial defence and balance of power in Russian Arctic policy is likely to be further reinforced by the growing great-power competition between the USA and Russia, which has gained new momentum following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

This essay proposes the epistemic ethos of passionate humility for knowledge production about global constitutionalism in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. By employing the conceptual strategy of elucidation, passionate humility can reveal a counter-intuitively counter-hegemonic use of the global constitutionalist triad of human rights, democracy and the rule of law in the Ukrainian resistance against Russia’s war. As an approach to knowledge production, passionate humility addresses epistemic ignorance by retrieving situated non-imperial knowledges while also confronting the ambivalent politics of such knowledges. It therefore hints at how we can both decentre and make use of resources associated with global constitutionalism, without valorizing western elitist discourses, reinscribing the inter-imperial mode of knowledge production or sanitizing vernacular knowledges. Passionate humility does so in three moves: it problematizes hegemonic epistemic frames (either west-centred or Russia-centred); it foregrounds complex social agency, which resists a fixed theoretical or ideological language; and it reveals the contextual deployment of the Occidentalist language of global constitutionalism in the Ukrainian public discourse as a practice of negotiated subjecthood. Such practice can be counter-hegemonic without being inherently progressive.

The use of facial recognition technology (FRT) as a form of intelligence has recently made a prominent public appearance in the theater of war. During the early months of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian authorities relied on FRT as part of the country's defensive activities, harnessing the technology for a variety of purposes, such as unveiling covert Russian agents operating amid the Ukrainian population; revealing the identity of Russian soldiers who committed war crimes; and even identifying dead Russian soldiers. This constellation of uses of FRT—in a war increasingly waged on the digital and information front—warrants ethical examination. The essay discusses some of the most serious concerns with FRT in the context of war, including the infringement of informational privacy; the indiscriminate and disproportionate harms it may inflict, particularly when the technology is coupled with social media intelligence; and the potential abuse of the technology once the fog of war dissipates. Some of these concerns parallel those to be found in nations that are not engulfed in war, but others are unique to war-torn settings.