No 10 (2023)

The article investigates the Brazilian diplomatic reaction to the aggravation of the conflict in Ukraine in February 2022, during the administration of president Jair Bolsonaro. It identifies that Brazil has adopted a position of impartiality, consisting of four main directives: condemnation of hostilities; acting against the diplomatic isolation of Russia; not complying with economic sanctions and maintaining bilateral channels of dialogue with Moscow. The article investigates the decision-making process that led to the adoption of the position of impartiality, taking into account domestic and international factors, and describes its execution throughout 2022. The research argues that the Brazilian position is in line with the country’s traditional diplomatic practices, according to the permanent principles of Brazilian foreign policy proposed by scholar Amado Cervo. Furthermore, Brazil’s choice for impartiality brought positive consequences for bilateral relations with Russia and served Brazilian political, economic and commercial interests.

The article presents an analysis of the activities of the Brazilian corporation Petrobras as a political actor. The choice of Petrobras as an object of research is due to its key position in the country's oil sector, its status as a state-owned enterprise and the amount of financial and other resources available to it. The main part of the study reveals the characteristic features of the company as an actor that has and implements a number of types of power: structural, instrumental, institutional and infrastructural. Despite the fact that most of the corporation's shares are owned by the state, Petrobras has a certain autonomy to make decisions and implement them in the oil sector. Such autonomy, on the one hand, makes it necessary to build mutually beneficial relations both with the state and other participants in economic and political processes. On the other hand, it can turn into a potential source of conflicts between the government and the management of the corporation. The study showed that the effective use of these powers allows Petrobras to assert and expand such autonomy and maintain its status as an important socio-economic and political actor.

The purpose of the article is to find out peculiarities and new developments in the implementation of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Latin America. To achieve it, the author performs a number of supporting tasks: pointing out the reasons for the interest of Latin American countries in participating in the Initiative and considering the status of its main projects in the region, she analyzes difficulties in the way of the BRI, characterizing Beijing's new approaches to the mechanisms of overcoming them. The author's conclusion is that, despite all the challenges, the idea and practice of the BRI will not lose its resonance on Latin American soil, at least in the medium term. This is due to such factors as the multiplication of areas of interaction in high-tech industries known as "new infrastructure"; further aggravation of the PRC's strategic needs in resources that the continent is rich in, real expansion of the BRI area to Latin American territory, impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to China's growing international importance as a supplier of vaccines and medical expertise, intensification of joint ventures’ practice (JVs) and a number of others.

This article identifies trends in the development of coalition interaction of political parties within the center-left government of Pedro Sanchez in Spain (2020 – summer 2023). The type of the ruling coalition in Spain is determined as unstable due to the high ideological distance between the participants and the lack of previous experience of cooperation. The political agenda of the government was revealed, it included such social problems as raising the minimum wage and pensions, combating unemployment, labor reform, reducing housing and energy costs, combating corruption, achieving gender equality, and political settlement of the Catalan conflict. The author describes in what aspects of government policy compromises or contradictions prevailed between the main participants of the coalition: PSOE and “Unidas Podemos”. The participants reached compromises in the sphere of increasing citizens' incomes and combating unemployment. The contradictions between the parties are most characteristic of the perception of the Catalan conflict, foreign policy, participatory democracy, progressive taxation. The election campaigns of 2021–2023 led to a significant decline in the influence of “Unidas Podemos”, turning the PSOE into the dominant member of the coalition. The significance of the article is shown in the assessment of the procedures and practices of interaction of parties (inter-party conferences) in the government of Spain, the forecast of the possibilities of creating coalitions after the national elections on July 23, 2023. The author makes the conclusions about “forced coalitions” at the level of national and regional governments. Pragmatic compromises based on the experience of the interaction of parties are also inevitable for the activities of the future right-wing government.

The present article devoted to the Spanish Conquest of the last Maya kingdom, the Tayasal. The present publication gives a brief review of their origin from the builders of Chichen-Itza and their historical fate in the Modern Times. The focus of the present research is the role of embassy of the fray Avendaño-y-Loyola in the Spanish Conquest of the last Indian Kingdom of the American Continent. The Author comes to conclusion, that Avendaño’s attempt to use the Itza’s religious believes was decisive in failure to all attempts to induct them into Spanish subjects.