Search

The article explores the resource capabilities and strategies the traditional and rising powers use to bring food, energy and military-political security to the world most fragile states. There is a certain complementarity in the relations between both the mentioned actors in international relations, since the negative externalities forming in and around fragile states require resources that could be provided and effectively provided by the world most powerful countries. The assumption that the key characteristic of a power (center) is a capability to translate outside military-political security allowed to the authors to categorize the USA, EU and, with certain restrictions, Japan as traditional centers of power; while Russia, China, Brazil, Turkey, and, to a lesser extent, India and Korea as rising ones. In terms of quantitative parameters, the United States, the EU, India and Russia have the resources to ensure food security, while Russia is the only major power that has a net surplus in energy foreign trade. Russia's comprehensive resource capability in the context of “broad” security supports its leadership status in its efforts to stabilize and maintain the world order. Considering the behavioral and not resource aspect, the strategies of global and middle powers in the world most fragile states, with the exception for the EU and Turkey, correspond to their resource capabilities. Both deliver mineral fuels as well as Turkey supplies crops to fragile countries having overall defi cit of such commodities. This may indicate that these centers of power as well as Russia implement the “donor” strategies conceptualized in the literature for the rising powers of the modern world order.

The purpose of the study is to compare the role of the G7, the G20 and BRICS in the global governance system on the basis of an assessment of the representativeness and potential impact of these informal associations on the rest of the world on the basis of a comparative analysis of a number of socio-economic indicators of participating countries. The relevance of the research is related to the fact that these institutions represent a certain counterbalance to the leading formal universal international organizations, functioning on a permanent basis, primarily the UN. Based on a two-tier economic consolidation assessment of considered multilateral institutions participants and their respective macro-regions, the authorы came to the following conclusions: the «Group of Seven» and «Group of Twenty» have a higher potential for implementation of joint economic projects and initiatives because of a higher level of their economic consolidation based on bilateral trade; the analysis of economic connectivity of macro-regions the countries participating at global leading informal associations belong to showed a low level of effective potential for joint projects realization for most of them. It means that the multilateral institutions of highest level are capable to provide better common coordinated solutions to the problems of insiders, and not those of outsiders; the G7 members consolidate four of the five macroregions to which they belong, while among thirteen macroregions G20 members belongs to there is only one additional consolidated entity which is Southeast Asia. Thus, a threefold increase in the number of the G20 participants does not enlarge the effective geography of the G20 impact on the rest of the world; even though the BRICS group has the reduced potential for effective implementation of joint participant initiatives because of low level of consolidation union members lesser than 10%, and only China belongs to the economically connected macro-region - East Asia; Brazil, Russia and South Africa are included in the potentially prospective regions with a level of connectivity more than 15%.