Taming the Bear? Germany and Europe’s fragile eastern frontier

Over the past few years, the EU’s monetary woes have placed Germany’s central role within the European project in the limelight. Its sheer economic weight made its agreement to the various bail-outs and rescues mandatory; the Merkel government’s insistence on austerity over stimulus, and the over-ruling of elected governments have further weakened the Union’s claims to democratic legitimacy, already on shaky ground because of the weight of its unwieldy, powerful Brussels bureaucracy

Weaving webs of insecurity: fear, weakness and power in the post-Soviet South Caucasus

This thesis' central aim is the application of a Wendtian-constructivist expansion of Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT) on a specific case study: the South Caucasus. To that effect, three concepts of RSCT – amity/enmity, state incoherence, and great power penetration – are expanded and developed within the broader above-mentioned ontological-epistemological framework. Amity-enmity is elaborated into an integrated spectrum founded on varying ideational patterns of securitisation alongside objective characteristics, and encompassing conflict formations, security regimes and security communities. States are conceptualised as ideational-institutional-material "providers of security"; their incoherence is characterised over three tiers and two dimensions, leading to a distinction between vertical and horizontal inherent weakness, ostensible instability and failure. Great power penetration is dissected into its objective, subjective and intersubjective elements, resulting in a 1+3+1 typology of its recurring patterns: unipolar, multipolar-cooperative and multipolar-competitive, bounded by hegemony and disengagement. After the specification of a methodology incorporating both objective macro- and interpretive micro-perspectives, two working hypotheses are specified. Firstly, that state incoherence engenders high levels of regional enmity, and, secondly, that patterns of great power penetration primarily affect transitions of regional amity/enmity between conflict formations and security regimes. The framework is subsequently used to triangulate these hypotheses through an application of the theoretical framework on the post-Soviet Southern Caucasus. An initial macro-overview is subsequently provided of the Southern Caucasus as a regional security complex; the three expanded concepts are consequently investigated, in turn, from the discursive micro-perspective. The South Caucasus is categorised into a "revisionist conflict formation", the nature of its states' incoherence is characterised, and existing patterns of great power penetration are identified as competitive-multipolar. In the final chapter, the hypotheses are largely confirmed, and various scenarios as to the possible emergence of a regional security regime are investigated

Iran: Where the power lies

Since the days of the Islamic Revolution, and certainly since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s clerical elite has included a variety of factions – broadly classified as reformist, pragmatist, conservative and radical. For a long time, many in the West pinned their hopes for change on a shift in the balance of power in favour of the first two – the reformists and pragmatists. During the presidency of Mohammed Khatami, there was a palpable sense that a shift in emphasis from the theocratic towards the democratic aspects of the institutional structures of the Islamic Republic would be possible. However, any such hopes were soon dashed by the dominance of conservatives and radicals within the regime’s theocratic arm

Liberalism, status, and Russia’s civilisational turn

The build-up of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border and Russia’s involvement in Kazakhstan have reignited debates about the country’s interventionist role in post-Soviet states. Kevork Oskanian documents how Russia has veered from subversive normative imitation of the West in the aftermath of the Cold War, to open confrontation with the liberal international order

A New Method for Classifying Flares of UV Ceti Type Stars: Differences Between Slow and Fast Flares

In this study, a new method is presented to classify flares derived from the photoelectric photometry of UV Ceti type stars. This method is based on statistical analyses using an independent samples t-test. The data used in analyses were obtained from four flare stars observed between 2004 and 2007. The total number of flares obtained in the observations of AD Leo, EV Lac, EQ Peg, and V1054 Oph is 321 in the standard Johnson U band. As a result flares can be separated into two types, slow and fast, depending on the ratio of flare decay time to flare rise time. The ratio is below 3.5 for all slow flares, while it is above 3.5 for all fast flares. Also, according to the independent samples t-test, there is a difference of about 157 s between equivalent durations of slow and fast flares. In addition, there are significant differences between amplitudes and rise times of slow and fast flares.Comment: 46 pages, 7 figures, 4 tabels, 2010AJ....140..483

The statistical analyses of flares detected in B band photometry of UV Ceti type stars

In this study, we present the unpublished flare data collected from 222 flares detected in the B band observations of five stars and the results derived by statistical analysis and modeling of these data. Six basic properties have been found with a statistical analysis method applied to all models and analyses for the flares detected in the B band observation of UV Ceti type stars. We have also compared the U and B bands with the analysis results. This comparison allowed us to evaluate the methods used in the analyses. The analyses provided the following results. (1) The flares were separated into two types, fast and slow flares. (2) The mean values of the equivalent durations of the slow and the fast flares differ by a factor of 16.2 \pm 3.7. (3) Regardless of the total flare duration, the maximum flare energy can reach a different Plateau level for each star. (4) The Plateau values of EV Lac and EQ Peg are higher than the others. (5) The minimum values of the total flare duration increase toward the later spectral types. This value is called the Half-Life value in models. (6) Both the maximum flare rise times and the total flare duration obtained from the observed flares decrease toward the later spectral types.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures, 8 table

Turkey's global strategy: Turkey and the Caucasus

Turkey has had long-standing links with the region called the ‘South(ern) Caucasus’, comprised of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, including the de-facto independent entities of South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The area was, for a long time, the scene of intense competition between the Persian-Sassanid and Ottoman Empires, before its gradual incorporation into the Russian Empire during the fi rst half of the 19th century. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Turkey has become a major regional player through direct investments, and the trade and transportation links tying the Caspian basin to the outside world over Georgia in circumvention of Russian territory, most important among them the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline. But the weight of both history and ethnic kinship has distorted the operation of material interests, even under Ankara’s new, zero-problems foreign policy. The historical legacies of massacre and confl ict during and after World War One continue to weigh down on relations between Turkey and Armenia, and the close political interaction between Ankara and Baku – encapsulated in the slogan ‘One nation, two states’ – remains a major ethno-political factor shaping the regional environment