War and Revolution: Friedrich Engels as a Military and Political Thinker

This article explores the link between political and military strategy and tactics in the work of Friedrich Engels. Though widely praised for his understanding of military affairs, Engels’ interlocutors have tended to be dismissive of his political works. By exploring his politics through the lens of his military writings this article challenges the view that Engels was a mechanical materialist and political fatalist thinker. It argues that his military writings cannot be understood apart from his political works, and that, whatever the historical limitations of the specific conclusions to which he came, his method in these writings illuminate his profound grasp of the relationship between strategy and tactics at both the military and political levels.     

Competitiveness through integration in the European Union Strategy for the Alpine Region: a ‘balanced development’ approach

In the last 10 years, the European Union has devoted specific attention and resources to the establishment of macro-regional strategies, with the objective of joining together transnational areas to favour the effective and organized management of common challenges. In most macro-regions, however, the identification of strategies to increase competitiveness is a rather difficult task, given the extreme internal diversity in economic activities. Focusing on the youngest macro-regional strategy – EUSALP – this paper highlights the specific combinations of territorial growth assets that allow to overcome the inefficient use of local abundant strategic resources, in line with a ‘balanced development’ approach. The results, obtained on the basis of a database gathered at NUTS3 level, are useful to provide policy suggestions to support the competitiveness of EUSALP through synergies and complementarities, according to a cooperation networks perspective.     

Courting white southerners: Theodore Roosevelt’s quest for the heart of the South

Most studies of President Theodore Roosevelt address his “southern strategy” to revive the Republican Party’s fortunes in a region where it was effectively shut out by 1900. This essay revisits Roosevelt’s approach to the South between 1901 and 1912 and argues that wooing white southerners away from the Democratic Party, more than any other approach, represented Roosevelt’s overriding strategy for the revitalization of the southern GOP.     

Clearing the Fog of War: public versus official sources and geopolitical storylines in the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Abstract

Military action undertaken by the Russian Federation against Ukraine in 2014 has had enormous geopolitical ramifications. This resulted in what is almost certainly a permanent change in sovereign territory, with the former gaining and the latter losing the strategic Crimean peninsula. But Russia’s moves also set in motion a violent conflict in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Although the United States and the NATO alliance have advocated a geopolitical storyline that attributes blame for this to Russia, close scrutiny of the evidence they have adduced in this regard fails to establish this culpability conclusively. However, by utilizing data collected and analyzed in the public realm, it is possible to determine with more certainty that, in certain places and at given times, Russia was indeed the aggressor. The rapidly increasing amount of public-sourced information globally and the growing sophistication of analytical methods by non-governmental groups presages more complete understanding of such conflicts without reliance on official information.     

US grand strategy and national security: the dilemmas of primacy,decline and denial

The foreign policy crises that the USA has confronted under the administration of President Barack Obama have generated profound uncertainty about whether the USA can maintain what has been its consistent grand strategy since the end of the Cold War: primacy. The authors argue, drawing on a neoclassical realist framework, that this uncertainty has been driven not so much by fundamental changes in the international system itself, but rather by how such changes have been interpreted by the Obama administration and its critics. US grand strategy is now caught between approaches best described as the ‘decline management’ of the Obama administration and the ‘decline denial’ of president Donald Trump, which reflects the fracturing of the domestic ‘political support system’ that has underpinned primacy since the end of the Cold War.     

From Democratization to Securitization: Post‐Arab Spring Political Order in the Middle East

This article examines the question: why and how the wave of democratization in the Middle East has receded, giving way to the prioritization of security in the post‐Arab Spring by conducting analyses at three levels: societal, state, and international. By applying the main concepts and theories found in the literature on democratization and securitization and by analyzing the Bertelsmann Stiftung's Democracy Status Index, the Arab Barometers Survey, and the Arab Opinion Survey, the article concludes that: at the societal level, the tragic unfolding of events after the Arab Spring prohibits the public from pushing a reform agenda; at the state level, the post‐Arab political environment raises doubts among the ruling elite about how far political reforms should be extended; and at the international level, with the rise of new security threats, international pressure on Middle East countries to democratize has been restrained, giving way to security cooperation as the top priority.     

中国借记卡市场竞争力分析

本文从微观经济学角度,利用Pip-pow-Schoder模型详细分析了消费者、商家和银行选择现金与借记卡的成本及银行的收益,从利益最大化行为角度,进一步分析了各方偏好的借记卡交易域,在此基础上,提出银行应根据借记卡市场推广度的不同,细分客户与地区,分阶段采取不同的收费策略。     

LES SITES WEB DE QUATRE MUNICIPALITÉS FRANÇAISES AU CRIBLE DE LA GÉOGRAPHIE DES REPRÉSENTATIONS

L'objectif de cette étude est d'éclairer la question des représentations municipales sur le Web à partir de l'observation de quatre sites Internet des communes d'lssy-les-Moulineaux, Marly-le-Roi, Metz et Parthenay. Cet échantillon ne se veut pas représentatif de l'ensemble des sites municipaux français dont l'immense majorité ne recouvre qu'une prosaïque vocation promotionnelle (pour caricaturer: venez visiter notre ville, ses spécialités, son musée, ses hôtels, ses restaurants, son église…). Nous avons donc sélectionné quatre sites qui remplissent de fait — grâce notamment à l'investissement personnel de leur maire au projet —à la fois la fonction de vitrine de ce qui «se fait de mieux» en France en matière d'implantation des Technologies d'Information et de Communication dans une commune, et de laboratoire, compte tenu du fait que les quatre expérimentations sont reconnues d'utilités publiques par le ministère de l'Industrie et auréolées du label «autoroute de l'information». L'objectif de cette étude n'est pas de faire une évaluation du projet-laboratoire et de ses impacts socio-spatiaux sur le territoire local, mais s'applique davantage à analyser le projet-vitrine à partir des observations de leur site Web. Elle tente de démontrer comment un projet de développement local novateur passe nécessairement par une mise en visibilité forte sur un média qui est à la fois support et contenu, (média et médium selon une expression macluhanienne) dans un monde, celui de la communication politique, où le discours est partie intégrante de l'action. The objective of this study is to shed light on the question of municipal representation on the Web, based on observations of the Internet of four French ‘communes’: Issy-les-Moulineaux, Marly-le-Roi, Metz and Parthenay. This sample is not representative of all French municipality sites, of which the large majority exist only for promotional uses (‘come and visit our city, its specialties, its museum, its hotels, its restaurants, its church…’). We have chosen four sites which serve - thanks to the personal investments of the cities' mayors in the projects - as showcases of the best examples of the establishment of information and communication technologies in ‘communes’ and as a laboratory. This last, because the Ministry of Industry has recognized that the four experiments are useful to the public and so has given them the name ‘information highway’. The purpose of this study is not to evaluate the laboratory aspect of the projects and their social and spatial impacts on their local territories but to analyze the showcase aspects of the projects, based on observations of the communes' websites. It attempts to demonstrate how new local development projects automatically acquire high visibility in a medium that is both support and content (medium and message, to use McLuhan's expression) in a world of political communication where speech is an integral part of action.     

中共三代领导集体全球战略观的演变

建国以来 ,中共三代领导集体根据国际战略形势的变化发展 ,提出不同时期的全球战略思想 ,毛泽东依据世界格局的变化 ,提出了三个世界理论 ,并从战略高度及时调整了我国的内外政策 ;邓小平分析了当代世界格局的新变动 ,提出了和平与发展是时代主题的理论 ,进一步调整了中国的外交政策 ;江泽民分析了我国改革开放和现代化建设的新国际环境 ,提出了“争取一个长期的和平国际环境”的战略方针 ,开创了面向新世纪的外交新局面。从建国初期的“一边倒”战略到六七十年代的“一条线”战略 ,从“一条线”战略再到 80年代确立的不当头、不结盟的战略方针 ,中共三代领导集体的全球战略观有着内在的密切联系 ,即都始终坚持了独立自主和反对霸权主义 ,维护世界和平的原则立场。表明了中国共产党人深邃敏锐的世界历史眼光和对世界历史进程的自觉把握。     

蒙古国地缘特性及其国际关系

在国际关系格局中,从力量和影响来看,蒙古不是一个十分有地位的国家。然而,由于蒙古国的地缘政治位置的特殊性,在大国战略关系中,蒙古就象一个砝码,它能使亚太战略结构的天平产生倾斜。蒙古对中国、俄罗斯、美国、日本等大国均有重大战略价值,它的对外政策取向将对这些大国之间构成的复杂的战略关系产生深刻影响。同时,蒙古处于有关大国之间形成的地缘政治结构中,蒙古的国家战略和对外关系受到大国关系的严重制约,具有清晰的地缘政治特点与模式。