Editorial note

Abstract

The present issue of the Bulgarian Journal of International Economic and Politics comes out amidst the increasing complexity and dynamics of international scene at both the global and the regional level. Given the centrality of the ongoing war in Ukraine for Europe, the Balkans and Bulgaria, it is no surprise that several of the articles published in this issue treat in one way or another this prominent conflict with dire implications. Thus, the first article introduces the important and yet so far largely neglected climate-security nexus with regard to the war in Ukraine, connecting the prospects of post-war recovery to EU policies of green transition and ecological sustainability. Prompted by the war-driven popularity of private military companies (PMC), the second article addresses the largely under-researched PMC phenomenon from the viewpoint of contractors’ motives to join private armies and specifically the motivation of Bulgarian citizens to join international military companies. The third article focuses on a Serbian foreign-policy issue and specifically on the country’s attempts at diversification of energy resources and the related dynamics of Serb-Russian relations along the lines of the Serbian position regarding Ukraine’s territorial integrity and Serbia’s possible accession to the sanction’s regime against the Russian Federation. The next article presents the results of an ethnographic piece of research that addresses student protests in Serbia and Bulgaria in the last decades, seeking to explain why they do not facilitate the post-socialist transformations in the two countries. Drawing on data of a national representative survey, the fifth text examines the problem of the social legitimacy of mass privatization in Bulgaria, contextualizing it within the mass privatization in the Czech Republic and Russia.
Building on the experience of the last BJIEP issue (vol.2/issue 1) with the invited contribution by Ivailo Kalfin, in his current position of Executive Director of the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, we decided to institutionalise the practice of invited contributions by introducing a separate Expert's Insights rubric. It is launched in the current issue with the analyses of Ilhan Kyuchuk, a MEP, Member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the European Parliament and Co-President of ALDE party, on the challenges the EU has been facing and the institutional and policy responses it has come up with in that regard.