With the rise in civil conflicts, third­party interventions aimed at protecting and advancing national interests have become common. However, despite potential benefits, such interventions can result in negative reputational and material consequences for the intervening party. As such, decisions to intervene may often confront domestic political constraints. This study integrates the institutional aspect of democratic peace theory and neoclassical realism to examine internal and structural factors  that influence the decision to intervene. Theoretically, enhanced democratic institutions are expected to produce a moderating effect on intervention, but this effect is sidelined when structural incentives take hold. To test these assumptions, a wide range of data sources are utilized, including the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) External Support Dataset and the International Military Intervention Correlates (IMIC) developed at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). Using these two datasets, the author proposes to separate military and non­military interventions in order to test for potential differences in effects that characteristics of political systems may have on them. Varieties of Democracy data are employed to measure institutional characteristics. The analysis reveals heterogeneous effects of different aspects of institutional design on the propensity to intervene. The author suggests that the differences in effects could be attributed to variations in institutional specifics, public reactions, and types of intervention. Specifically, military interventions as a result of their publicity and overtness produce special short­term and long­term public opinion dynamics that are reflected in different effects of various forms of political behavior. Structural incentives consistently increase the likelihood of intervention, though they only partially mitigate the impact of differences in institutional characteristics. 

Amidst growing confrontation between Russia and the West, the good news is a number of rulings issued by international dispute resolution bodies in favor of the Russian Federation in 2024. The article underlines the necessity to maximize the use of a wide range of legal tools aimed at upholding the interests of Russia, its domestic business and related foreign companies. It is crucial to scrap a fragmented defensive strategy of mild situational reaction reduced to a passive response to certain hostile acts in favor of a holistic offensive strategy of legal struggle in every sphere. The Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) is one of such instruments. It provides for cross-border protection of capital investments of investors from some member states (including those associated with non-ECT countries) in the territories of other countries. The authors posit that the ECT can be practically applied to secure infrastructural energy investments in the Nord Streams destroyed by the explosion in the fall of 2022. It is particularly suitable for inducing the countries whose maritime spaces harbor the pipelines to reimburse the multi-billion-dollar material damage caused by the sabotage, as well as to disclose the information carefully concealed about the incident. The Treaty can also be employed as a lever for further negotiations on a package settlement of all the problems that have arisen between Russia and the West.

The article examines the knowledge economy which took shape in the 1990s largely through the efforts of international organizations, with the OECD playing a central role. Drawing on the approaches of intellectual history, the authors analyze the theoretical foundations of the knowledge economy – namely, how disparate intellectual traditions were selectively assembled into a coherent policy framework. The paper situates the concept within the broader field of international political economy, emphasizing how it reflects and reinforces the intersecting interests of national and transnational actors within the global economic order. Four key theoretical pillars underpin the knowledge economy: new growth theory, information society, national innovation systems and human capital. The article demonstrates that each of them emerged from distinct intellectual and socio-political environments, and their validity was historically contingent upon the conditions in which they were first deployed. While the attempt to synthesize them into a common framework highlights their contextual limitations, the knowledge economy is deemed remarkably resilient. It has managed to become background knowledge shaping contemporary understandings of economic progress – even amid global crises. The reason for this endurance is its alignment with the material and ideological interests of a dominant social bloc in the United States during the 1990s–2010s: finance capital, high-tech industries, national and international bureaucracy. The paper concludes that the knowledge economy should be understood as a descriptive framework for the unfolding dynamics of the global economy. This dynamics is best observed in the formation of a three-tiered structure – enterprises centered on intangible assets, capital-intensive enterprises, and labor-exploitative enterprises. The knowledge economy serves as a tool for the ideological articulation of this regime.