Releasing new issue of the Czech Journal of International Relations (58:3)

The three full-length research articles were written by Ondřej Rosendorf (Charles University), Šárka Kolmašová (Metropolitan University Prague) and Martin Schmiedl (Mendel University and University of Hradec Králové).

Rosendorf’s article, titled Alliance Complements or Substitutes? Explaining Bilateral Intergovernmental Strategic Partnership Ties, analyses why states establish strategic partnerships and argues that these are likely to emerge when presence of a common threat coincides with the absence of their joint membership in a formal alliance.
Kolmašová’s piece is titled How do Latin American States Engage with Responsibility to Protect Norms? A Typology of Positions, and presents a typology of Latin American states’ engagement with R2P norms built on their level of engagement and degree of support for R2P.
Lastly, Schmiedl’s article On Current Armed Insurgencies in the Sahel and the Role of Climate Change: Merging Political Ecology and Environmental Security merges environmental security literature with political geography to account for the role of climate change in African security concerns.

Outside of research articles, the issue also offers one discussion article. The discussion article titled From Donbas Conflict to the Russian-Ukrainian War. A Review of Literature, by Vít Klepárník (Czech Technical University), classifies the latest scholarly writing on the origins of the conflict in Ukraine into three groups based on the role of history and identity, interplay of third actors and contentious politics. He argues that the latter of these three is the most appropriate tool to explain the origins of the conflict.

Lastly, the issue introduces a new format we call a Book review forum. CJIR editor Daniel Šitera put together a list of authors including Aliaksei Kazharski (Charles University), Daria Krivonos (University of Helsinki), Stephanie Rudwick (University of Hradec Králové) and Gábor Scheiring (Georgetown University Qatar) to discuss Ivan Kalmar’s latest book titled White but Not Quite. The book positions Central Europe in the racialized hierarchies of West/Europe and their not-quite-white Others. The authors debate the main contributions, as well as blind spots, of the book, and elucidate the role of the marginalization of Central Europe in Europe’s historical orders. At the end of the forum, Kalmar (University of Toronto) offers his response to the critiques.