ABSTRACT
The beginning of the twenty-first century has been marked by powerful tectonic shifts in world politics, which an army of academics and experts, mostly from Western schools of scholarship, have been hard at work describing and analysing. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this whirlwind of geopolitical change was triggered by the sociopolitical developments that have unfolded on the one-third of the global landmass occupied by the former Soviet Union following the superpower’s collapse.
