Energy is integral to the Russian leadership's vision of Russia as a great power engineering a structural transition in international affairs to a polycentric world. If energy makes an essential contribution to the federal budget, it is therefore both bound up with questions of national security and how Moscow seeks to project influence across the world. Indeed, official documents state that energy is a state instrument for conducting internal and external policy, and Russia's role on world energy markets determines its geopolitical influence. This chapter examines the role of energy in contemporary Russian Grand Strategy by looking at how Russia is seeking to break into new markets, develop new transit routes, and claim a larger share of world resources. It examines the development of oil and gas in the Arctic, and the importance of the Northern Sea Route, as well as how the Russian leadership seeks to preposition Russia in the wider global commons. It will also assess how the interests of different state actors, including state companies, the Russian military, and others align, and their roles in shaping and creating strategy.

This chapter highlights the value of pragmatism in a peace process and how the contentious areas of parading and policing and justice were managed. The chapter also looks at the Bloody Sunday Inquiry and the role of pragmatism in dealing with these complex and conflicting areas.

In this chapter, we provide an overview of political developments since the Good Friday Agreement in order to establish the historical context for the diverse essays that follow. We begin by depicting the tensions, especially over the issue of ‘decommissioning’, that hobbled the early attempts at power-sharing government and would lead to several suspensions of the Stormont assembly. We then move on to explain how it was that the supposedly ‘extremist’ parties – Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party – were able to forge the deal that would, finally, bring seemingly stable devolved government to Northern Ireland. For all the semblance of stability, these unlikely coalition partners would over time become riven by multiple and deepening forms of division. Some of these arose out of the ethnonational disputes that are the traditional fare of Northern Irish political life – flags, parades and language rights. Others would derive from class issues less familiar to the political culture in the region – in particular, the introduction of the Welfare Reform Act. These tensions would eventually lead to the collapse of the Stormont institutions, a suspension that was widely attributed to a controversial renewable energy scheme but in fact owed a great deal more to developments elsewhere in the UK. The outcome of the Brexit referendum has altered, perhaps irrevocably, the political context of Northern Ireland, ushering in an era of profound constitutional flux. While the Stormont assembly has been restored, the advent of the coronavirus has merely served to highlight the animosities that exist among the supposed coalition partners. As Northern Ireland prepares for its centenary, there are forces at play that threaten/promise to question its very existence in the very near future.

This chapter concludes the book by considering three ‘existential’ challenges to Northern Ireland as it enters its second century of existence. The first is that of the coronavirus pandemic. The chapter considers how the pandemic put pressures on the Executive that had been newly established after the ‘New Decade, New Approach’ accord of January 2020. The integration of Northern Ireland with Ireland and with Great Britain posed particular challenges when it came to managing the coronavirus. Managing the challenge was made a lot easier in practical and political terms when the approaches of the British and Irish governments became more closely aligned. The ease with which the coronavirus could become another issue over which unionists and nationalists could have opposing views was no surprise. The pandemic hit within a few weeks of the UK leaving the European Union. What it meant for Northern Ireland depended greatly on the compromise negotiated between the UK and EU in the form of the Northern Ireland/Ireland Protocol. This compromise was made necessary by those same open borders between Northern Ireland and Ireland and Northern Ireland and Great Britain. This chapter summarises what this may mean for Northern Ireland and how the Brexit debate further polarises unionism and nationalism in Northern Ireland. The constitutional debate has re-emerged as a ‘live’ issue. This could lead to deepening polarisation, but it could also provoke serious consideration of what sort of society people would like to build out of a wholly transformed global economic, political and social context.

This chapter is intended to complement the two previous chapters by examining how the afterlives of the Troubles have been played out on the big and the small screen. Given that the political settlement in Northern Ireland made no meaningful provision for dealing with the multiple ‘legacy issues’ arising from the conflict, it has hardly been a surprise that the region’s violent recent past has come back to haunt it. One of the spaces in which this has been most evident is in the fictions scripted for cinema and television that have appeared since the restoration of devolved government in 2007. Employing Mark Fisher’s reading of the Derridean notion of ‘hauntology’ to frame our analysis, we examine a number of recent films and TV series concerned with Northern Ireland. In the world of cinema, we examine features such as Hunger, ’71 and Good Vibrations. On the small screen, we provide close readings of The Fall and Derry Girls. While these visual representations often differ greatly in terms of both tone and content, they all suggest that, even a generation after the end of the Troubles, Northern Ireland remains haunted not only by those that were lost during the conflict but also that which was lost in the transition to peace.

This chapter is concerned with how leadership operates in a peace process and examines how decisions were used to reinforce leadership goals and objectives in order to increase the possibilities of agreement

In this opening chapter, we set the scene for the book by challenging the almost hegemonic view that the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) is, in the words of President Clinton, a ‘work of genius’ that should be adopted as a model for other societies emerging from conflict. We begin by suggesting that we need to regard the Northern Irish ‘peace process’ in plural terms and, in particular, to acknowledge the often crucial ‘vernacular’ forms of peace-building’ that go on at community level. We then move to suggest that the reliance of the GFA on certain ‘liberal’ and ‘realist’ readings of international relations has ensured that it has three principal flaws. First, the celebrated peace deal is premised on a familiar but arbitrary temporal distinction between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ which renders it unable to deal with the complex afterlives of the Troubles. Second, the GFA rests on an implicit hierarchy of victims which ensures it cannot acknowledge certain ever more prevalent forms of violence in Northern Irish society. Finally, the political settlement in Northern Ireland assumes a political and cultural binary – that between ‘unionists’ and ‘nationalists’ – which no longer adequately describes the complexities of identity in the region. Having set out this critique, we conclude that the Northern Irish peace process has been rather less than the success that many influential global figures would have us believe.

Soviet military planners divided the world into continental and oceanic “theatres of military action” (teatri voennykh deistvii (TVDs)). These TVDs allowed the Soviet General Staff to take a regional approach to the consideration of the military geography, or the political, military, economic, physical-geographical, and cultural variables essential for military planning. Due to technological advances first observed in the 1991 Desert Storm operation and its aftermath, Russian military thinkers began developing theories about what impact these technological advances would have on regional TVDs, and even the possibility of global TVDs. Although the Russian military was in dire straits after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its fortunes have significantly improved under the reign of Vladimir Putin, as the Russian military now has the capabilities to begin implementing these theories. The Russian military is now thinking and planning in terms of globally integrated operations and uses terminology such as “aerospace TVD” and “informational TVD”. These new global TVDs have not displaced the regional TVD concept, but rather these systems appear to complement one another. This chapter outlines the TVD concept in the Soviet era, discusses the implications of Vladimir Slipchenko’s view of the changing character of war on the TVD concept, and argues that technological developments and thinking about global TVDs are driving changes in Russian force design and capability development.

The chapter explores the development of strategic planning in Russia and closely associated issues, such as the network of situation centres and a “single information space” making possible their close interaction as an aid to the country’s strategic management.There was little interest in strategic planning during the 1990s when market transformation was underway, but after Vladimir Putin became president the situation changed, and in 2009 he issued a major edict calling for the development of an integrated system of strategic planning and a network of situation centres. The intention was to create a system that would link strategies for socio-economic development with measures to ensure the country’s national security. Work started on a Law on Strategic Planning, finally signed into law in 2014. Since then, many concepts, foundations, forecasts, strategies, and programmes have appeared at federal, regional, and local levels. Presidential structures, government, and federal ministries have created a system of distributed situation centres, now being developed also at the regional level. But the systems face problems: the desired combined focus on development and national security has not been realised. The pace of development of strategic planning has slowed, and reconsideration is now underway of some of the institutions and procedures. The pursuit of a strategic approach to governance in a rapidly changing world is not as simple as initially thought, but a serious commitment to strategy remains an essential feature of the exercise of power in present-day Russia that is not always appreciated in the West.