This article is devoted to the role of tsarist doctors in solving several foreign policy issues in Russia during the reign of Peter the Great. It analyses the activities of two doctors – Robert Erskine and George Polikala. Erskine played a crucial role in Peter I’s communication with the Jacobites under deteriorating relations between Russia and England in 1717–1718. Polikala, in turn, assisted the Russian government in several interactions with the Ottoman Empire.Sources indicate that Robert Erskine was the leading lobbyist for the idea of the Russian government supporting James III Stuart. With the help of his relatives, who actively supported the overthrown dynasty, Erskine negotiated with representatives of the Swedish King Charles XII and with other European diplomats during the second European trip of Peter the Great. The diplomatic scandal of early 1717 connected to the disclosure of another Jacobite conspiracy involving the official circles of Sweden affected Erskine’s endeavours. During these events, the doctor’s secret negotiations with representatives of a state at war with Russia became public. Despite the official assurances of Peter the Great and Erskine that they were not involved in the activities of the opponents of King George I of England, negotiations with the Jacobites continued later, during the Tsar's stay in France and Holland. Erskine remained the main initiator of these contacts even after Peter I returned to Russia, which only aggravated the problematic relations with England. However, the death of the Tsar’s doctor led to the fact that the “Jacobite intrigue” in Russia was over.George Polikala was involved in the activities of Russian diplomacy in Turkey. In particular, he had contacts with the Russian envoy in Istanbul, Pyotr Tolstoy, and attempted to withdraw Antioch Cantemir from the territory of the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately, the information about Polikala’s participation in Peter I’s secret diplomacy events is sketchy. The article concludes that the tsarist doctors played an essential role in implementing the foreign policy initiatives of Peter I.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Eastern question and the search for ways to solve it occupied a central place in the politics of both Russia and European states. The solution of this issue was closely linked with the process of formation of the young Balkan countries. The Formation of new statehood in Serbia typologically coincided with a change in the system of European international relations of the 19thand early 20th centuries, played an important role in the events of the Eastern question, while claiming to be the Yugoslav “Piemont.” However, by the beginning of the 20th century, it was war that had become, both for Serbia and for the other countries of the region, not only a means of gaining state sovereignty, but also the main way to resolve its own interstate contradictions, which happened against the background of an external factor – the impact of the Great Powers on the political processes in the Balkans. These factors led to the natural militarization of the everyday life of Serbian society. The presence in the everyday consciousness of the image of a hostile “other” became one of the main ways to consolidate the country, when attitudes towards war, pushing the values of peaceful life to the background, created a special basic consensus in the state development of Serbia at the beginning of the 20th century, and the anthropological role of the military factor essentially influenced the underlying processes that took place in the country at the beginning of the 20th century. In the conditions of a new stage of destruction of the Balkans along ethno-political lines, the factor of the militarization of everyday life again becomes an important element of the historical policy of the Balkan countries and the construction of a “new past.” In this regard, the understanding of many problems and possible scenarios for the development of the current Balkan reality is linked to this phenomenon. Thus, the study of the impact of special “extra-constitutional” institutions on the political life of Serbia at the beginning of the 20th century is important for a wide range of researchers, including for a systematic analysis of the crisis in the territory of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

States face the question of how International Law norms should be applied to the harmful use of information and communications technologies (hereinafter ICT) in many different collective formats. Against this background, the intensive disclosure by states of their positions is a brand-new trend. As a result, managerialism is slowly giving way to consensualism. However, do these collective and individual efforts help to clarify the key problems connected with the qualification of these harmful practices? Based on the analysis of the reports of the UN Group of Governmental Experts and the Open-Ended Working Group, as well as the official positions articulated by states, this article seeks to reveal the extent to which states have managed to achieve a consensus on the qualification of harmful cyber activities under International Law, and on which issues. This question is crucial for identifying the subsequent practice in the application of international treaties, which establishes the agreement of the parties regarding their interpretation, as well as the practice and opinio juris as elements of international customs.

The research confirmed that the principle of non-intervention in domestic affairs, while its full applicability in the cyber context is not questioned by states, has very limited significance for the qualification of the harmful use of ICTs, which brings to the fore[1]front the principle of sovereignty. However, the official positions of states, based on a denial or, vice versa, an affirmation of this principle as a separate rule, postulate the impossibility of applying the principle of sovereignty without the concretization of its content in the cyber context. The fact that there is a multitude of approaches does not foreshadow the possibility of reaching a consensus on this issue in the near future. With respect to the jus ad bellum and jus in bello norms, the readiness of the majority of states to qualify the cases of harmful use of ICTs as a “use of force” or even an “armed attack,” and to overstretch the scope of the International Humanitarian Law notions of an “attack” or “military operation,” is described as being indicative of the abuse of the “military paradigm” to assess these activities. The approaches of some states go so far beyond the normative scope of these notions that their assertion loses legal significance and seems to have rather a political character by primarily fulfilling the deterrent function.

The article concludes by diagnosing that a consensus between states on the application of International Law to harmful ICT practices has been reached at a very high level of abstraction and hardly transcends the limits of the general acknowledgment of the applicability of International Law in the cybersphere. This fact enshrines indeterminacy as the main feature of the qualification of harmful use of ICTs under International Law and renders almost every stance on nuances of the application of International Law to these acts to be ad hoc ones.

This article discusses an essential dimension of modern diaspora research related to the functional status of diasporas in contemporary armed conflicts. The conventional point of view is that diasporas can only act as a “third party” of a conflict either by contributing to the deepening of the contradictions between the opposing parties, or by acting as an intermediary between them. In theoretical terms, the author relies on the concept of “new” or network wars (netwars) and tries to demonstrate that there are the prerequisites for the more active involvement of diasporas in armed conflicts at the structural level of modern world political processes. To identify the structural requirements for such participation, the author turns to the analysis of two cases. The first case is the emergence and functioning of the Polish I Corps in 1917–1918 in Russia, which was formed when the Polish population of Russia was separated from their territory of origin as a result of the First World War. An analysis of the documents shows that the leadership of the corps quite clearly evaded political subordination to the Russian authorities and retained only military subordination, implying that the task of this unit was to participate in the restoration of Polish statehood. The second case is the genesis and evolution of the “Secret Army” of General Vang Pao in Laos in 1960–1974. This unit played an essential role in the Civil War in Laos, as it managed to restrain the onslaught of the superior forces of the Patet Lao Front and troops from North Vietnam. Such longterm participation in hostilities was made possible thanks to the logistical and technical support of the US special services. The two case studies allow us to conclude that there were armed units in previous historical periods with a clear diaspora component: they made a significant contribution to the overall dynamics of the confrontation between major parties to the conflict. This experience helps analyse contemporary conflicts with a diaspora component, especially in the context of the gradual erosion of power resources in world politics. The participation of diasporas in armed conflicts outside the “third party” framework is associated with the achievement of several conditions, both internal and external.

This article summarizes the outcomes of the implementation of the Water Strategy of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2020 in its part concerning international politics, and assesses the new challenges to international cooperation in the field of the protection and use of transboundary waters that Russia is expected to face in the coming decade. The 2010s were marked by both a changing situation in the field of water availability in Russia, its neighbour countries and the whole world, and changing scholarly approaches to the impact of water scarcity on international politics. Most of the approaches agreed that water scarcity more often leads to international cooperation. While agreeing with this approach, the authors critically assess the assumption that water scarcity is more often a source of conflicts, and that multilateral international institutions are the best tool to mitigate these conflicts. The authors find that this approach is based on Hobbesian notion of the natural condition of war of all against all for scarce resources, the only alternative to which are institutions of coercion, albeit not always perfect. The authors also find that other approaches based on Hobbesian political philosophy separate international political processes caused by fear and by scarcity, the two most important “passions that incline men to peace,” according to Hobbes. Fear, including the fear of scarcity, tends to drive conflicts, but scarcity as such is more likely to generate cooperation. While multilateral institutions are sometimes capable of mitigating conflicts, in conditions of water scarcity, bilateral and minilateral – that is, created by a small number of parties – institutions of cooperation turn out to be more effective. The experience of Russia’s interaction with its neighbours in the field of protection and use of transboundary water resources considered in the article provides yet more evidence of this. The authors conclude that the international politics component of Russia’s water strategy for the coming period is more consistent with the approach that assumes that water scarcity generates cooperation rather than conflicts. They also conclude that bilateral and minilateral institutions of cooperation offer countries des[1]tined to share a common river basin instruments of interaction that are more suitable for the conditions of a particular basin than multilateral institutions can offer.

In recent decades, demographic processes, economic shocks, increased morbidity and other systemic problems have led to the gradual appearance at the international level of a whole spectrum of threats to health, characterized by severe socio-economic consequences for each country regardless of the welfare level. Today, the challenges of ensuring universal coverage of services, access to safe, high-quality medicines, affordable healthcare, effective response to health emergencies, and antibiotic resistance are not limited to WHO regulations, but are included in the agendas of the United Nations, the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other intergovernmental organizations. The need to form a unified approach to regulate the activities of numerous participants in international healthcare regulation has served as an incentive for the gradual development of international legal regulation of the field of health protection, becoming the subject of study of leading legal scholars, as well as international organizations. The present article provides a comprehensive analysis of the main historical stages in the development of international cooperation in the field of health protection, which served as the basis for the formation of international health law in the field of health protection as a new branch of international law. Special attention is paid to the assessment of the role of globalization processes in changing the nature of threats to human and public health and their impact on the formation of the concept of global health governance. Based on the systemic problems that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, the author formulates the main areas for improvement in the international legal regulation of the health sector.

 The research portion involved studying the following documents: acts of a universal and regional nature; resolutions of international organizations; and the legal positions of UN Specialized Agencies, as well as of professional scientific associations. The theoretical basis of the research is the scientific works of Russian and foreign experts in international law and international relations in the field of health protection. The article was prepared using the general scientific method of cognition, including the formal logical and situational method and private law methods, such as comparative, historical and formal legal methods.

The paper formulates a conclusion about the creation of “international health law” as a new branch of international law, uniting international legal norms and principles governing the relations of subjects of international law, as well as other participants ininternational relations in the field of human health. In the work, the author presents the main sources of “international health law” and formulates the subject of regulation of this branch of law.Describing the features of international cooperation in the field of health protection, expressed in an increase in the number of involved international organizations and other participants who are not subjects of international law, the author substantiates the formation of the concept of global health management and analyzes the main scientific publications in this area. Having studied the nature of health threats that have formed over the past decade under the influence of globalization processes, as well as the systematic problems of international cooperation demonstrated by the coronavirus pandemic, the authors emphasize the need to implement the repeatedly proposed initiative to develop a universal act that forms the basis of international legal regulation of health protection.