Climate politics forms a subsystem of world politics. In this subsystem, states are differentiated by their ambitions to decarbonize their economies. These ambitions proceed from national policies and the nationally determined contributions (NDC) submitted by states in accordance with the Paris Agreement. Based on states’ climate ambitions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) produce multiple reports ranking states and evaluating their contributions. The main parameter of state differentiation by climate ambition is the expected year of achieving carbon neutrality. In 2019–20, the UK and the European Union (EU) promoted this parameter with the Green Deal, and eventually other metrics were overshadowed. The previously used climate parameters and rankings based on them were contradictory and depended heavily on the chosen methodology. Apart from being untrustworthy, they put some western countries in unfavourable positions. N. Luhmann’s new systems theory identifying “carbon neutrality” is taken as the main code of the climate communication subsystem that differentiates the climate subsystem of world politics from other functional subsystems. In this review article, how the emerging code of carbon neutrality is used by states and international organizations to form a new hierarchy in international relations is examined. Various constructivist and normative theories, from Foucault’s poststructuralism to the historicism and normativity of the English School, are applied in order to capture the possible implications of the political use of carbon neutrality for international relations. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential prospects of climate politics hierarchization for power redistribution in international relations.

Introduction. State leaders and heads of international organizations argue that COVID-19 is a global security threat that requires international responses. However, to date, there is no stable international cooperation regime in the field of counteracting the virus, primarily at the level of vaccine development. Moreover, countries are competing in this area, considering primacy in the creation of a COVID-19vaccine not only as a step towards the fight against the virus, but as a tool to strengthen their international positions and increase international prestige and “soft power”. Methods and materials. The authors investigate the problem from the standpoint of the securitization theory, according to which national and international security threats are formed by political actors as speech acts and discursive practices. Analisys. From the standpoint of this theory, despite the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic is securitized at the national level in many countries, at the global level, this securitization discourse about COID-19 discourse is embedded in a broader macrosecuritization framework, which assumes that the dominant threats are associated with the confrontation of great powers. Results. The consequence of this is the legitimization of the policy of “vaccine nationalism” and the lack of international cooperation in the field of vaccine production.

Civilizations are not a novel subject of research.Todaytheyareincreasinglypopularbothinaca demicandpoliticalspheres.State and non-state actors talk as if civilizations were real actors of world politics. The article outlines the intellectual map of civilizational research in world politics. It finds three actual and one possible directions of civilizational research, namely: civilizational dynamic, inter civilizational ethics, politics of civilizations and civilizational politics. The author stresses the importance of nonessentialist approach in civilizational dynamics studies, its leader being Peter Katzenstein. The rest of the article is devoted to cultivating the selected research direction. The author proposes to view civilizations as a strategic reference framework rather than a real actor of world politics. These reference frameworks are constructed on religious value basis and detailed in a shared literature corpus. They are heterogeneous and in a constant state of flux. It can be viewed as a continuum with one pole being a fundamentalist state of civilization and the opposite one - post secular state of civilization. The middle ground is occupied by secular civilization. The clash and dialogue are not among civilizations but rather among different states or social groups within and among civilizations. The most conflictual group is a fundamentalist one, its reference framework is totally determined by religious values. Compromise for such a group is impossible. The most cooperative group is post secular one since it is based on dialogue. The author concludes that dialogue is guaranteed among post secular societies within the Christian civilization. Within and among non-Christian civilizations dialogue is possible but not guaranteed.

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