The Nabucco Project Within the Context of Energy Supply Security and International Politics
The Nabucco Project is a project, which aims to transport rich natural gas resources of the Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East to the European market via Turkey. In this study, the Nabucco Project was evaluated within context of the energy supply security concept and international politics. Firstly, interdependence between national power and energy supply security was investigated. How oil and natural gas became strategic raw materials of world politics beyond being primary energy resources of the global economy was examined. It was found that discovery of rich oil and natural gas resources in the Central Asia and the Caucasus after the Cold War turned the region into a focus of interest of the global and regional actors. In this connection, perspectives of the global and regional actors about the Nabucco Project were examined.As a result of analyses and evaluations, it was concluded that the Nabucco Project is a project that can significantly enhance Turkey’s geopolitical importance and make Turkey one of the key countries of the east-west energy corridor.
The More Assertive and Pragmatic New Energy Policy in Putin’s Russia: Security Implications for Northeast Asia
The article examines Russia’s New Energy Policy (NEP) and its impact on Northeast Asian security and the development of the Russian Far East. In contrast to analyses highlighting competition between China and Japan for Russian resources, to the contrary it is argued here that greater cooperation among consumer states in Northeast Asia would be beneficial for Russia. Although the NEP has resulted in changes in the composition of foreign investors in Russian energy projects, the author suggests that Moscow is interested in multinational cooperation in the energy sector because it would help diversify the regional energy market and contribute to the development of the Russian Far East and eastern Siberia.
The uprising of the marginalised: a socio-economic perspective of the Syrian uprising
More than three years after the outbreak of protests in a number of Arab countries, the role of socio-economic factors in these events is attracting more attention. One of the cases that needs more research is Syria. More than three years into the Syrian uprising, the socio-economic roots of the protest movement that became one of the bloodiest civil conflicts in the history of the Middle East need to be examined. While it has been observed that the Syrian uprising, contrary to some ‘Arab Spring’ countries, has been an uprising of more marginalised social groups with a strong role played by poorer segments in the society, particularly rural and rural-to-urban migrants, the socio-economic explanation for this is still underdeveloped. This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of this issue by examining the political and socio-economic compromise that underlined the rule of the Ba’th party in Syria for four decades and unpacking how a combination of internal and external shifts that started in the 1990s and intensified in the 2000s led to the erosion of this compromise, providing the background to the events that began in 2011.