The article addresses the issues of foreign policy risks related to environmental problems in the Russian Arctic. It is shown that at the turn of 2019 a new system of external challenges to the Russian development of the Arctic was formed. Desuverenization will progress through environmental requirements. An adequate system of Russian response to these risks is needed. At the same time, increased attention to the environmental aspects of economic activity will prevent attempts to intercept management.

The paper is devoted to the study of the features of political participation in the modern information society. In the context of the rapid digitalization of the political space, the analysis of existing and emerging forms of political participation is of particular relevance.

The aim of the paper is to study the impact of an individual’s internal attitudes on his/her willingness to participate in socially significant events, both online and offline. The influence of internal attitudes of individuals is considered in the paper through the prism of two factors: the perception of social media as the main channel for the expression of civic interests (perception factor) and people’s attitude to the idea of the possibility of a single political leader appearing in social media space (leadership factor).

Poll among students was chosen as the main applied research method, since students are an active users of modern social media.

The poll results show that almost half of active users of social media are ready to participate in social processes both online and offline. In addition, the vast majority of respondents perceive the Internet platforms of modern social media as the main channel and mechanism for expressing civic activity. The poll results also showed that half of active users deny the possibility of a single political leader appearing in the social media space (although there is a large proportion of those who, on the contrary, agree with this idea — more than a third of all respondents). Cross-analysis of the poll data confirmed the assumption indicated in the work, according to which the individuals perception of social media as a communicative channel effective for the purpose of civic participation, contributes to their readiness to participate in socially significant events online. At the same time, the study of the impact of the leadership factor on individuals’ readiness for various forms of political participation did not form an unambiguous opinion on the nature of this impact and requires further study. This study demonstrates that activity in social media does not contribute to the socio-political passivity of their users.

Any subject of international relations is a potential ally of one of the superpowers. Sometimes traditional analysis does not allow to understand which one. Then a content analysis of the press language can come to the aid of traditional analysis. The language of the press is considered as an expression of collective consciousness, and its features — as an expression of collective unconscious. Collective consciousness and collective unconscious belong to a certain social group. This approach is based on the Marxist, Durkheim and Habermas traditions. A certain media may focus on national interest, or may not, as it may express social group values incompatible with that orientation. If a media that focuses on national interests sympathizes with a subject of international relations, such a subject is a potential ally of the country to which the media belongs, and vice versa. Whether the media sympathizes with a certain subject of international relations is revealed using content analysis.

In this study, the Yemeni movement Ansar Alla (Houthis) was chosen as a subject of international relations with an ambiguous geopolitical orientation, the newspaper “Izvestia” which focus on the national interests and the newspaper “Gazeta.ru” which does not focus on the national interests was chosen as a mass media. Using content analysis, it was concluded that “Izvestia” sympathizes with Houthis, and “Gazeta.ru” treats the Houthis negatively. On the basis of the assumption that the language of the press expresses the true interests of the social group, it was concluded that the Houthis are a potential ally of Russia.

The purpose of this article is to substantiate the determinants of contemporary changes in military security policy, which is reflexive management. Military security is considered as a function of political attitudes and strategic decisions, and its governmental potential is a changing mechanism designed to meet regional and global demands and tendencies of society development. The author substantiates the assumption that today, the system of ensuring military security requires radical governmental transformation, and the key mechanism of this transformation is reflexive governance. The theoretical research method is a conceptual transformation of the governmental aspect of the military security policy through the prism of the theory of reflexive governance. The concept of reflexive governance has not yet been properly developed in Russian academic investigations, but its relevance is determined by a substantial change in the existing prospects for the analysis, development, and implementation of the military security policy in times of peace: (1) shifting the attention of civil cervants to the mechanisms of transformation of military security institutions to global challenges; (2) activation of discussions about “open” and “closed” spaces in politics; (3) development of the potential of governance based on continuous education and network management; and (4) development of a network governance system. Within the framework of reflexive governance, cognitive and normative beliefs form the political-administrative hierarchy and economic incentives as mechanisms for coordinating military security. At the same time, the mechanism of ensuring military security consists of such components as (1) subjects and (2) objects of military security; (1) normative and regulatory, (2) theoretical and research, and (3) activity components of military security. Reflexive governance, while becoming the basis of the military security in a modern state, implies that in the arms race countries should not forget about deeper, fundamental goals of state management. Any action both within the framework of direct provision of military security and within the framework of diplomatic regulation of relations in the international arena should be devoted to collective and individual-administrative reflexing of decision makers. A key role in military security policy should be played not by the theory of warfare, but by the development of tools to help resolve emerging conflicts peacefully.

As a result of changes in the technological tenor and congruous with it organization of the world economy, serious changes have occurred in the gradation of participants in armed conflicts. Firstly, the warring parties are not only states now. Secondly, the vast majority of the targets to be overpowered to ensure victory in the conflict are currently in the private sector and out of state control. Also, an essential feature of the information confrontation is that in the vast majority of situations, the direct perpetrator of an information attack cannot be identified immediately and to a large extent due to the fact that “military” conflicts in cyberspace in the context of international relations can be “embedded” in various forms of struggle for power: political, economic, informational, technological, media and ideological, etc. That is, a significant number of participants in ordinary everyday life implicit activities in all walks of life from all over the globe can be not only indirect but also direct participants of informational conflict.

In the digital era, targets selected for destruction can have completely different and unexpected properties, which leads to the existence of a significant number of approaches to the classification of targets of informational impact. Force is used against physical and virtual objects in the physical, informational and cognitive dimensions.

The complexity of assessing the physical damage inflicted on states, and their population in the cognitive sphere conformably, and relating it with the practice of assigning international responsibility for the use of traditional means of warfare makes it impossible to form any adequate universal international political and legal regime for countering information threats in the near future. The elimination of threats in cyberspace is a common interest in ensuring international stability, but at present it can be carried out by states only on their own.

A statement of the specified list of unacceptable aggressive actions carried out through information influences in the federal legislation will be, in essence, a preventive measure, since it will establish a threshold restriction for other international actors to interfere in the internal affairs of the state from outside.

This article examines issues related to the protection of human rights in the context of the fight against the use of gene doping. The fact of using gene therapy in relation to a person already includes a significant range of potential ethical problems, including probable health risks, the degree of awareness of the patient’s consent to perform certain manipulations, as well as the long-term consequences for a person’s life, and, which is equally important, for future generations. At the same time, the problems of the use of gene doping in relation to athletes significantly aggravates and complicates the process of building regulatory approaches. The article notes the particular susceptibility of the athlete's right to health care in the context of the problem of gene doping. The paper studies the features of the implementation and protection of the human right to protect health and the right to privacy, including legislation aspect of biomedicine and bioethics, as well as taking into account the difficulties associated with the identification of the use of gene doping. Conclusions regarding possible areas for improving legal regulation in this area, among which, strengthening or detailing the legal regulation of the provision of high-tech medical care, properly informing athletes, coaches and other sports professionals about the possible risks of applying genetic engineering methods to humans, proper regulation of testing procedures, toughening criminal liability and expansion of the subject matter of such crimes are formulated.

Tighter competition of any economic entities leads to the use of such a mechanism to combat it as economic convergence — the rapprochement of the activities of various economic entities, aimed at increasing the efficiency and competitiveness of its participants. At the same time, the most important modern trend in social development is digitalization, which also has an impact on convergence processes in the economy. Disclosure of the impact of digitalization on convergence processes includes consideration of the stages of development of digitalization, levels of convergence, their relationship, as well as identifying the directions and results of the impact of the last stage of digitalization on modern economic convergence. The results of the study are the identified parameters of economic convergence and their content, the disclosure of the business model characteristics of entrepreneurial activity within the framework of modern economic convergence, the possibilities of joint business implemented by intersectoral convergence, as well as the prerequisites of joint business due to the influence of the digitalization factor on all these processes. Keywords: economic convergence, convergence parameters, digitalization, business model of entrepreneurial activity within the framework of intersectoral economic convergence, prerequisites for the effectiveness of joint business.

The concept of digital infrastructure is rather new and was widely adopted together with distribution of digital technologies and expansions of their functions in social and economic system. The concept of digital infrastructure is closely connected with concepts of information infrastructure and infrastructure of information technologies or information and communication technologies. The last, in turn, relate to a concept of information society. Info-communication technologies and networks modify social interrelations, new technologies create new communities which mainly arise and function on the network principle. Info-communication networks form new tools for interaction.

The monetary policy of the Central Bank is in the sphere of interests of economists of various specializations. Determining the value of money in the economy, the money supply, and ensuring the effective functioning of the national payment system, the regulator has a significant impact on the state of the economy and determines the prospects for its development. One of the most important monetary policy instruments is the key rate. However, the efficiency of its application in different economies at different historical periods is different.

At the same time, commercial banks, being the core of the credit system, are extremely dependent on the volume and quality characteristics of accumulated deposits. Private clients’ deposits are an important resource for both short-term and long-term operations of credit organizations. In Russia, banks play a leading role in the financial market. In this regard, the evaluation of the impact of a key rate as an important monetary policy instrument on the banks’ deposit policy is of particular relevance in the current state of the Russian economy. Therefore, determining as an aim of the research the evaluation of the current impact of the Bank of Russia key rate on the Russian credit organizations’ deposit policy, the authors sorted out the necessary relevant data on interest rates and deposit volumes in Russian commercial banks in 2014–2018, assessed the strength of the relationship between the Bank of Russia key rate and banks’ deposit rates and the volume of deposits in the country, identified the problems of implementing monetary policy in Russia and evaluated the effectiveness of the key rate as the monetary policy tool.

The global trends underline importance of e-commerce, development payments system as well as alternative banking services. China is considered as one the leader in digital transformation. In that regard development of Tencent in the previous decades and the strategy of the company give understanding, how new financial services evolve from traditional approach to platform model. We believe that payment systems as well as other financial platforms would play more important role, competing with traditional banking system and determining landscape of financial system in future. At the same time strategies, based on digital platform, are also actively implemented by Russian financial sector. But competition of new financial organizations with traditional banks are more difficult in our country, because some banks (including Sberbank, Tinkoff) are started building their own platforms. Platform’s strategies are usually effective in mass market, because they are based on cost efficiency model. Nevertheless, some platform could be implemented in premium sector too and in the article, we developed private banking platform strategy for a large Russian bank, which might present strong competitive advantages in the nearest future. Current epidemic enforces digitalization processes, including premium sectors.

The article considers one of the most important economic indicators — labor productivity, determines the dependence of economic and social growth on its increase, analyzes the target indicators of the national project of the same name, and suggests measures aimed at improving the methodology for calculating labor productivity at the enterprise, which should contribute to a more correct reflection of the real situation in the country.

The article develops to the analysis of the application of project management in the implementation of long-term interregional initiatives. The relevance of the study is due to modern experience in initiating and implementing major interregional initiatives. Practice shows that they need no alternative real project content, i. e. the availability of interconnected local investment projects, the implementation of each of which together provides high interregional (macro-regional) and region-wide importance. To date, there is a shortage of projects at the interregional level in Russia. This problem is recorded in the national Spatial Development Strategy.

We formulate an author’s approach to defining of the interregional initiative as an activity to develop, present and launch a significant large complex interregional project (a set of interconnected investment and other related projects), potentially capable of having a significant impact on the social and economic development of the country, the federal district / macro-region.

The study analysed detail the lessons learned from project management at the regional level, which can be useful for the implementation of integrated interregional initiatives. The main models of “spillovers” of experience of implementation of project management from federal to regional level for development of own initiatives of subjects of the Russian Federation (direct transfer, reset of state programs, project management of new spatial forms of organization of economic activity, initiation of joint projects with federal development institutions, etc.) are given.

We have underlined possibilities project management in promoting interregional initiatives should focus on the following areas: taking into account innovative opportunities concentrated in systemically important economic complexes; Ranking projects in terms of effects for regional business communities. Projects involving and combining local resources should benefit.

In regard with innovation development, we have proposed specific attention to interregional initiatives related to the acquisition of new knowledge, associations of the potential of regional scientific centers, synthesis of accumulated knowledge in the form of patents, advanced technologies, industrial models.

The article is dedicated to recent domestic political transformations in Slovakia and their possible impact on Russian-Slovak relations. The paper studies the main aspects of the current political and economic partnership between the Russian Federation and the Slovak Republic; it is indicated that economic cooperation with Russia remains a relatively significant foreign policy aspect for Slovakia, primarily due to energy supplies. Nevertheless, the gradual decrease in the intensity of bilateral interaction is highlighted. According to the authors, the “anti-Russian pivot” of Slovakia in 2020 can contribute to a further reduction in the scale of Russian-Slovak cooperation; the Slovak elections radically altered the configuration of political forces within the country, the republic’s parliament is led by the opposition forces with clear anti-Russian rhetoric.

Considering possible variations of Russian-Slovak political and economic cooperation in the foreseeable future, authors propose moderately optimistic, neutral and pessimistic scenarios. It is underlined that the damage from the predicted deterioration in relations for Russia due to the current trends in bilateral cooperation between the countries is assessed as rather insignificant.

One of the key tools that are traditionally used in solving media strategizing problems is advertising. The impacts of advertising on the processes taking place in the economy are significant and remarkably diverse, thus raising a big question to the media strategists to systematize and classify both the types of such impacts and the economic theories that study it. This work is devoted to the study of this issue: the most significant approaches to a comprehensive study of advertising at various planning periods (from instant to long-term strategic) are presented. We analyze the informative and persuasive functions of advertisement, compare the influence of its visual and textual forms and discuss key points of cognitive and behavior approaches to understand how advertisement affects the consumers’ demand. We describe basic models of economic equilibrium, which take the advertisement influence on different market structures into account, as well as two-sided models of media markets. It is shown that the less developed field of the economics of advertising is behavior and market influence analysis of the firms whose specialization is creating and distributing media content and advertisement. Due to this, we introduce the way to construct a new class of market models involving three types of economic agents — consumers, media firms and economic goods producers.

The individualization of social relations is the main trend in modern society. People do not depend on family and help of its members anymore. They rely on themselves, their individual capabilities and successes. Family modernization is determined by a socio-historical and political-ideological context of a country. It is expressed in a degree to which the family loses its economic functions. The global trend of family nuclearization and fertility decline is manifested differently in Russia and China due to the degree of urbanization, the economic activity of women and the population’s commitment to traditional family values. In order to preserve the birth rate, China began to pursue a neo-familism policy which based on the values of Confucianism. Russia does not have the opportunity to go the same way, because urbanization and modernization of society, started in this country much earlier than in China. The task of stabilizing the population of Russia can be solved only by further modernizing of family relations. It should lead to the creation of an egalitarian (partner) model of the family. At the same time, this does not deprive the Russian state of the opportunity to use the family as a buffer, mitigating for the population the cruelty of the realities of the market economy.

The purpose of this article is to justify the new role of the municipal official, i.e. the role of a transformation leader, whose activity is increasingly connected with the introduction of participatory governance, with the development of citizen participation and through this participation, progressive changes in the local community and the municipality as a whole. The method of research was theoretical analysis of foreign experience in the use of social technologies at the local level, which made it possible to form a theoretical model of transformational leadership. The formation of such a model is important from the point of view of developing key competencies of municipal officials in the near future. Empirical support for the theoretical analysis was obtained through content analysis of documents published on the website of the Governor of St. Petersburg (https://www. gov.spb.ru/governor). The research made it possible to conclude that transformational leadership behavior of municipal authorities is aimed at increasing the participatory nature of governance, the mission of valence in the ratio of clear and attractive development priorities at the municipal, regional and federal levels with the interests of local communities. The constant need to solve new social and political problems and contradictions by municipal leaders means a continuous search for a balance between efficiency and fairness, and the effectiveness of this balance depends on the transformational potential of municipal managers. The participatory style of municipal management implies that transformation leaders use social technologies for public participation in state and municipal management. Transformational leadership is based on the principles of democracy, efficiency, effectiveness, openness, rule of law, ethics, competence, innovation, sustainability, performance, and accountability. It makes it possible to replenish the deficit of public resources, which is increasing due to economic crises, as well as unjustified and excessive expansion of social services and the number of their recipients. Transformative leadership involves reaching consensus among different social groups, finding a balance between economic rationality and social justice, between extensive growth and environmentally friendly sustainable development. This becomes the main task of any level of government, primarily the municipal government as the closest to the place where problems arise and the search for optimal solutions.

Monograph review submitted “Methodological foundations for strategizing of socio-economic development of Uzbekistan”, in which, based on the example of Uzbekistan, a full-fledged study of the theory and practice of strategizing is carried out, and the expediency of applying the methodology of strategizing of academician V. L. Kvint in the development of long-term national strategies aimed at socio-economic development.