The global south as a transcalar geopolitical construction site: african profiles. – The last two years, with the post-Covid adjustments, the climate transition and two ongoing wars of global impact, have been marked by intense international attention towards the African continent, despite its vastness and diversity. On the one hand, this may please Africans, for the help that can come to the solution of their many problems; on the other hand, it worries them, given the historical precedents. There seems to be a new scramble for Africa underway due to the crumbling of the European and, more broadly, Western presence, against the backdrop of a more general reshuffling of the international order. In this reshuffling, the “Global South” seems to be playing an increasingly important role. Who will lead and how will the world’s economic, cultural and political evolution unfold? The game is complex, but Africa is certainly one of the main arenas of contention. As an immense reserve of raw materials - minerals, energy, agro-forestry - the Continent is emerging as the world’s leading area of demographic development while acquiring growing geopolitical relevance, due to the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian crisis, the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, but also, due to the conflicting profiles that are emerging in the Indo-Pacific, between China and the United States. In this fermenting context, heterogeneous events have taken place over the past couple of years (2023/24) that have recorded an impressive acceleration: two coups in Francophone Africa, three world summits that evoke a pan-African partnership (Russia-Africa, China-Africa, Piano Mattei), two geopolitical summits in Johannesburg and Nairobi (unified African position on climate change, September 2023). It is worth trying to trace a coherent geopolitical profile of this heterogeneous set of events.

Cinque Impatti Ambientali di Ampia Portata del Conflitto Attuale in Ucraina. – Nel 2013, il presidente ucraino Viktor Yanukovych tentò di rafforzare i legami con la Russia, provocando proteste che sfociarono nel conflitto nell’Ucraina orientale e nell’annessione della Crimea da parte della Russia. Nel febbraio 2022, la Russia ha avviato un’invasione su larga scala, scatenando una guerra totale. Questo documento si propone di valutare i cinque effetti più devastanti che il conflitto tra Russia e Ucraina ha sull’ambiente, con particolare attenzione alle conseguenze su ecosistemi e biodiversità, risorse idriche, qualità dell’aria, infrastrutture, e ai rischi radiologici e nucleari. La ricerca utilizza un approccio misto, basato principalmente su analisi qualitative e comparative, con l’integrazione occasionale di analisi geospaziali. I primi risultati indicano un grave degrado ambientale, legato all’inquinamento causato dalle attività militari e ai danni alle infrastrutture. In conclusione, si sottolinea l’urgenza di affrontare le conseguenze ambientali del conflitto per promuovere la sostenibilità nelle aree colpite.

V. Zelensky, J. Biden and the geography of body politics. – How does the body enter the media fabrication of the event? Does body politics have to do with the emotional characteristics of place? How can transcalarity, as the geographical foundation of geopolitics, be conceived not only in quantitative and dimensional terms, but also in qualitative and symbolic terms? To answer these kinds of questions, the essay analyzes the public profile of the corporality of Presidents V. Zelensky and J. Biden, on background of the Russian-Ukrainian crisis intertwined with the upcoming US presidential elections.

Vladimir Putin’s territorial trap: what the invasion of Ukraine reveals about the contemporary war-sovereignty nexus. – The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is a clear demonstration of how the conduct of a war can highlight what purpose the war is supposed to serve. In this article, President Vladimir Putin’s putative objectives in the Ukraine war are connected to the war-sovereignty nexus through the concept of geopolitical order, arguing that war fulfills different objectives under different geopolitical conditions because different combinations of sovereignty regimes are operative under different geopolitical orders. Attention then turns to the discourse of sovereignty adopted by Putin and how it reflects a certain set of contradictory understandings about sovereignty implicit in the conduct of the war.

NextGenerationEU between pandemic, war, and energy transition. – The energy transition has been strongly questioned by the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. The European Green Deal – designed and approved before the Covid-19 pandemic – became fully part of economic recovery program of the pandemic, and the war as well. Actually, the Green Deal becomes one of the fundamental pillars of the 2021-2027 Multiannual Financial Plan, as well as of NextGenerationEU and, consequently, of the various national plans related to it, including the Italian PNRR. As a typical win-win policy, NextGenerationEU must solve the problems related to the economic crisis, and those related to environmental quality, through the energy transition, as well. Obviously, the economic recover does not necessarily fit perfectly into an energy transition program. Actually, the policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions might imply many issues, related to economy and labor policies. Added to this are the socio-economic gaps between the countries that make up the EU, which have produced an energy divide (different levels of energy demand, different efficiency, different composition of primary energy sources), which has also further increased. from the pandemic, which requires a “calibrated” approach. This condition produces a more complex energy transition, and in many countries - especially those with the lowest GDP per capita - it could create obstacles to economic recovery. Although a Just Transition Mechanism has been prepared, precisely to bridge these gaps, the energy transition could be perceived as an external interference and a brake on growth, becoming a lever for forms of nationalism and sovereignty in key anti-European. The proposed work - after analyzing the structure of the energy supply in the EU, highlighting the inconsistencies in it - will address the impact of the Green Deal in the energy transition process associated with the relaunch of the economy.

Armed secessionism in the post-soviet space. The case of South Ossetia. – During the 1990s, several new independent States arose from the collapse of the Soviet Union were involved in ethnic conflicts that led to the secession of parts of their territory and to the self-proclamation of de facto republics supported militarily and diplomatically by Russia but lacking international recognition. The explosion and the lack of resolution of these conflicts can be linked to the Russian aim to exert a hegemonic influence on the former Soviet republics that pursue a pro-Western stance. This is the case of the “five days” war of August 2008, which saw Georgia and Russia fighting for the self-proclaimed republic of South Ossetia, territory formally belonging to Georgia but outside its control. Here we want to retrace origins and repercussions of this conflict, also in light of the Georgian position regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Geopolitics and Communication: First Analysis on the Epimedia Space of the Russian-Ukrainian War. – How do we translate the relationship between geo-politic and communication, when the wider analytical fields of the crisis have been solely reduced to the war dimension? This essay focuses on the Ukrainian crisis. Starting from the “epimedia space”, an analytical concept that proves to be of significant heuristic power, the paper explores the ways in which information is bent to the needs of communication. By mobilizing fake news, of course, and political propaganda techniques, to which manipulative paths of various kinds must be added.

The Afghan Wars: Between Economic-Cultural effects and Similarities in the Eura-sian Geopolitical Scenario. – The peculiar geomorphological configuration, characterized by imposing mountain ranges and desert areas, makes Af-ghanistan a difficult-to-access territory. Autochthonous peoples (different ethnic groups united by the war against “the foreigner” that also promoted the Taliban affirmation) widely exploited such a scenario suitable for guerrillas based on sudden attacks, difficulty accessing heavy weapons, and re-sistance to air attacks. The ability to counter invasions has been confirmed in the pushback of great powers, like Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States of America, which previously financed the mujahideen against Russian occupation. This management problem translates into the unexpectedly long democratization campaign of Afghanistan led by the Americans, which ended on August 15, 2021. The Enduring Freedom program, which envisaged the Western agreement of seventy nations for the implementation of a democratically stable situation and lasting in Afghan territory, proved a failure in the coexistence of the Americans in the cities and the Taliban in the valleys and mountainous areas. The withdrawal of American troops generated a sudden change in the international geopolit-ical scenario and, consequently, the Middle East balance. Through a brief historical overview of the conflicts that gripped Afghanistan, this work aims to provide a picture of the geopolitical, economic and cultural effects that have influenced the precarious balance of the Middle Eastern area of the world system.

The complicate role of violence in the interminable dissolution of multi-national territorial states. A comparison of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Empire and contempo-rary Russia. – The collapse in different ways of some multinational states at the end of the twentieth century (empires or micro-empires and apparent federations) prompted questions about the role that violence played in their disintegration. While some states have experienced peaceful separations (Czechoslovakia), others, such as the former Yugoslavia and only to a small extent the Soviet Union, have sought to violently hinder political-territorial disintegration, escalating violence and repres-sion to the extent of democides, genocides, ethnic cleansing, mass slaughter, and population displacement. This paper, developing personal reflections of the author and at the same time using a factual and theoretical analysis, aims to compare three case studies of disintegration (Yugoslavia, the Soviet Empire and contemporary Russia), seeking to identify the main factors (ideal and material) that stimulated, or conversely restrained, the use of violence in the course of disintegration. Indeed, these very factors may provide insight into whether those processes of disintegration have come to a halt or still underlie a long ongoing disintegrative phenomenon that former imperial centers are striving to stop with violence. While the degree of the latter may be limited and “settling” in the former Yugoslavia, contemporary Russia's attempt to restrain the long post-imperial disintegration for years has been involving a shift to open violence - that could affect even the internal dimension - along the lines of what occurred in Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Bosnia and Herzegovina in front of an European war resurgence: violence does not stop, yet the word “war” does not exist anymore. – The end of the Cold war did not determine “the end of history”, nor it started a new era of world peace under the sign of political and economic liberalism, globally recognized values. On the contrary, starting with the early ‘90s there were wars even within Europe’s core that caused hundreds of thousands of victims and millions of refugees. Yet the word “war” is cancelled from the dictionary: nowadays conflicts are called “humanitarian bombings”, “peace missions”, or in the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, “a special military operation”. After the 1992-1995 Bosnian conflict, the institutional asset imposed through Dayton peace did not satisfy the Country’s national élite’s expectations. So much that, in a context of poverty and unemployment where the nationalists of the Republic of Srpska – which stretches on 49% of the BiH territory – call for independence from Sarajevo in their programs through a unilateral rescission of the constitutional pact formed in Dayton, since 2021 there has been significant risk increase, both perceived and objectively measurable, of a new Balkan war, emphasized by the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. Within this scenery of great insecurity for the Bosnian population it becomes clear that a rapid integration of the Western Balkans – the anti-historical residual black hole in the continent – into the EU is necessary.

The Russian-Ukrainian conflict between Donbass and Crimea: spatial implications of a hybrid war – The Russian-Ukrainian conflict that began in February 2022 can be considered a peculiar model of «hybrid war»: it’s a conflict fought not only in a conventional way, but also with parallel activities, largely attributable to the world of communication, capable of use digital media strategically. These new modalities of war have particularly concerned Donbass and Crimea, two strategic regions in this conflict, highlighting the usefulness of geographical analysis in this regard. The purpose of this contribution is to illustrate and synthetically analyze the complex spatial roots of this conflict, then skilfully manipulated by the media systems of both sides.

Crisi finanziaria ed economica in Russia durante la pandemia di Covid-19 e potenziali soluzioni. – La crisi finanziaria ed economica nella Federazione Russa causata dalla pandemia COVID-19 è stata caratterizzata da un impatto negativo sull’economia reale che ha portato a un deflusso di fondi di investimento in titoli e a una rapida svalutazione di azioni e obbligazioni. Questa crisi globale è unica nella sua natura, poiché non ha prerequisiti economici e inizialmente si è sviluppata principalmente attraverso linee non economiche. A causa degli squilibri del mercato causati dalla pandemia, il governo russo ha elaborato il modello di sostegno finanziario alle imprese, volto a stabilizzare la competitività delle imprese, delle imprese commerciali stra-tegicamente importanti e delle PMI, nonché a sviluppare nuovi settori di attività. Date le limitazioni delle sanzioni, è essenziale mantenere e aumen-tare la competitività delle tecnologie nazionali. Questo fornirà un’opportunità per facilitare l’indipendenza tecnologica dell’economia rus-sa e stimolare la crescita economica assicurando uno sviluppo avanzato dell’industria nazionale della costruzione di macchine. I piani di ripresa economica dovrebbero concentrarsi sul passaggio verso una società sostenibile e inclusiva, con investimenti statali che diano priorità al settore finanziario, all’economia reale, al commercio estero, al settore sociale, all’economia digitale e agli incentivi agli investimenti privati.

Identity and geopolitics of Europe. The "fourth side" of the triangle Russia, United States, China