Valdai Club

2015

The Contemporary State

Ivan Timofeev

Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club, Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council, Associate Professor at MGIMO MFA of Russia

Dedicated to researching the transformations of the modern state as a political institution and a key actor in international relations. The programme focuses on such issues as regime change, the transformation of state sovereignty and of methods of state interventionism in the economy and citizens’ private lives, contemporary bureaucracy and mechanisms of social control over bureaucracy, the state’s competitors for the monopoly of power, and the correlation between organisation of the state and its foreign policy.

Valdai Papers

The Network and the Role of the State

Much has been said about how the Network – globally connected devices and information - is changing, flattening, and democratising social structures.

Bruce W. McConnell

The Legacy of Statehood and its Looming Challenges in the Middle East and North Africa

The authors argue that the condition of the state apparatus occupies a central position in the management of ongoing and looming regional challenges.

Osman Bahadır Dinçer, Mehmet Hecan

The Islamic State: An Alternative Statehood?

Today in IS we observe the creation of government institutes with a full vacuum of civil ones. Such a situation can continue only during the war.

Vasily Kuznetsov

Mafia: The State and the Capitalist Economy. Competition or Convergence?

The 29th Valdai Paper analyzes whether the mafia, the state and the capitalist economy are competing with each other or converging.

Antonio De Bonis

Discipline and Punish Again? Another Edition of Police State or Back to the Middle Ages

The 27th Valdai paper deals with the trends towards narrowing of the sphere of individual freedoms and increasing government interference into an individual’s private life.

Victor Sergeev, Elena Alekseenkova

After American Hegemony and Before Global Climate Change: The Future of States

The 18th Valdai paper focuses on the mattesr of life and death of States. Is the state in decline? Examining in details its way in the past the author shows how the state reacted to wars, economic collapses and other challenges.

Richard Lachmann

The Good News You Haven’t Heard and Then Some (Inconspicuous Deliberations)

The ninth Valdai paper introduces to the reader the fundamental principles of the virtual learning community. The author brings up the question: how to manage co-authorship of the collective destinies of the humankind, how to foster the global civics and become the dignified citizens of the world?

Universities as Actors and Instruments in Diplomacy. The Academic Soft Power Potential

The eighth Valdai Paper examines one of the aspects of the state's soft power - higher education. The internationalization of universities - one of the phenomena of the recent decades - according to the authors is comparable to the growth of the military power of the early twentieth century.

Ettore Deodato, Iwona Borkowska