No 1 (2012)

The article analyses the socio-political potential of the IT sectors of some African countries, as well as the role of modern mass media in shaping the political landscape of the continent.

The author touches the strategic problem of building China's foreign policy, which in a multipolar world will soon make the country do its significative choice and find an opportunity of modernization. Successful exit strategy from the financial crisis has played a low-down trick with Beijing - the «donor of capital» image raised fears among the leading powers. So, the future of China's foreign policy will depend largely on its ability to transition to a more dynamic and flexible response to rapidly changing trends - the «reset».

The given article contains hypothesis about the increasing level of influence of the system of tertiary education on stability of political regimes in many modern countries. In order to reveal the mechanism of such influence the author proposes the concept the natural rate of education which reflects optimal balance between labor market and educational system from the perspective of avoidance and tackling of social protests and instability. The author supposes that the stabilizing function of the system of tertiary education is caused by its role of the specific regulator of labor market and its capability to involve millions of young males, providing them long-term occupation. Under the state policy this stabilizing function may be enormously exaggerated and even reach the point of extremum and become counterproductive. The article contains interdisciplinary approach, being on junction of political science and economics. The author uses selected methodological foundations of the theory of human capital and introduces the following notions: educational pyramid, educational bubble, educational scissors and others. The second part of the article contains a case study. The cases included are the postWW2 United States, Egypt and Tunisia before the Arab spring and modern Russia. The author stresses that Russian tertiary education system plays a unique and significant political role.

The article presents author's vision of Russian cultural influence («soft power») regeneration and further development in the post Soviet Union territory and the rest of the world. Particular attention is paid to the necessity of Russian language learning programs in schools and universities of the CIS countries. There's also emphasis on the need to create a federal agency responsible for development and implementation of Russian public diplomacy, cultural diplomacy, foreign cultural policy, informational and propagandistic maintenance of the foreign policy. The survey also contains analysis of the conditions that are necessary to build up a new model of Russian public diplomacy.

At a time of not only empirical crisis, but also a philosophical crisis of the underpinning ideologies of the liberal capitalist economic system, there is an increasing tendency to dogmatize the work of classical thinkers, using selective readings of their work as the basis for support or critique of the status quo. Few are as subject to selective reading as the so-called father of modern economics, Adam Smith. This paper seeks to reflect on Smith's thought on two central aspects of the modern crisis: the nature of the limited liability corporation (whose profit motive is increasingly being challenged on a number of grounds) and the role of the individual in a market economy (amid accusations from across the political and philosophical spectrum about the increasing isolation, individualization, and neo-liberalization of the self). These subjects are not as different as they might seem as they both relate to Smith's conception of the nature role of the individual actor - homo oeconomicus - not only in a market in and of itself, but in a market that Smith saw as a social creation and a part of a human community.

The article questions the comparative methodology in the field of public policy. Integration processes all over the world require that traditional international comparisons take into account a new transnational dimension. Considering transnational dimension also demands introducing into research the sociological analysis of transnational actors and their interactions in different levels. Another important instrument to investigate transnationalization of public policy is policy transfer concept developed by D. Marsh and D. Dolovitz. This question is particularly actual for Russian political science considering that current economic and political reforms are accompanied by a transfer of new political practices and institutions.