Security and Defence Quarterly

7-23

Authors: Yu Wang

This study examines the effect of bargaining power on the allocation of U.S. military assistance. Conceptualising U.S. military assistance as an aid-for-policy deal, it applies a two-tiered stochastic frontier model to a data sample of the post-Cold War era. It shows that the bargaining effect accounts for a huge variation in U.S. military aid distribution. The volume of U.S. military assistance in equilibrium is lower than the baseline volume by 4% at the mean and by 6% at the median. The donor U.S. extracts a slightly larger portion of the transaction surplus at these central points. However, the game of surplus division is not always about equally strong hagglers as it may first appear. In fact, the quartile values show substantial variance in bargaining performance and, hence, an outcome of surplus division across transactions. The bargaining effect is highly significant in the allocation of U.S. military assistance in the post-Cold War era. The donor U.S enjoys a bargaining advantage at the mean and median, but rich variations are noticeable.

47-61

Authors: Bogusław Jagiełło

The purpose of this article is to identify the policy orientations of Russia in the Balkans. The historical aspects of Russia's political and cultural ties with the Balkan region, Russia's policy toward the Balkans during the USSR period will be highlighted. As the Balkans are an important factor in Russia's geopolitical game to retain influence in Europe, the author analyses Russia's contemporary policy in the Balkans, its interests and the measures taken to achieve its specific goals. It can be concluded that Russian involvement in some Balkan countries is exhausting the elements of the hybrid war. Two possible models of geopolitical behavior in relation to Russia could be distinguished. The first is to continue trying to stay as far away from Russia, the second is to build effective mechanisms for socio-economic cooperation. It can be implied that Russia will not hesitate to repeat the hybrid war scenario from Ukraine in order to maintain its political influence in the region. Only the return of the EU to a consistent policy of enlargement to Balkan countries and the economic strengthening of the Member States from the Balkan region can weaken Russia's political influence in the region.

77-92

Authors: Cemil Doğaç İpek, Mehmet Çağatay Güler

This study considers Russian-Turkish relations within the context of the Syrian war. We elaborate on both Russia’s and Turkey’s strategies and their understanding of the Syrian War, and consider how the two countries have managed to stay on the same page despite conflictual strategies and geopolitical interests in Syria. The current literature does not address this question and does not thoroughly compare their actions and engagements in the field. This article aims to clarify Turkey-Russia relations in the Syria and provides evidence of how they are in conflict and cooperate at the same time. In this regard, it is argued that the available evidence indicates that Turkey-Russia relations in Syria operate on the “compartmentalisation” strategy. In order to test this argument, the qualitative research method based on secondary resources is used while the theoretical framework previously formulated by Onis and Yilmaz (2015) is adopted. They conceptualise Turkey-Russia relations as if they do “compartmentalise economic issues and geopolitical rivalries in order to avoid the negative spillover of certain disagreements into areas of bilateral cooperation.” Furthermore, they claim that compartmentalisation can be hindered if there are deepening security concerns in an area like Syria. However, this article underscores that compartmentalisation does not only work by separating the economic issue from geopolitical rivalries; it also makes Turkey and Russia able to cooperate and conflict in a specific and fundamentally conflictual geopolitical issue such as Syria. The convergences and divergences that occurred in the Syrian field are conceptualised under the strategy of compartmentalisation. In this context, the cooperation – the signed agreements and established mechanisms, conflicts, and clashes in the field, are acknowledged as the consequences of the compartmentalisation strategy in Syria. The compartmentalisation strategy is specifically used in Syria in order to avoid the negative impacts of direct clashes in bilateral cooperation and agreements. It can therefore be concluded that the deepening divergence in security related issue does not necessarily prevent compartmentalisation; on the contrary, compartmentalisation paves the way for stabilisation of such deepening divergence.