Research

The financial crisis is challenging many of our assumptions about the course of politics and world affairs. Gordon Brown – only weeks ago portrayed as nearing the end of his time as UK prime minister – has been elevated to European, even global leadership status.

Many observers have drawn parallels between the current economic crisis and the Great Depression of the 1930s. However, the stock market collapse of 1929 did not directly cause what turned out to be the deepest and most prolonged recession of modern times, ultimately ending in the Second World War.

The war in Georgia has led to a surge of anti-western sentiment in Russia. The fact that Americans and Europeans broadly sympathised with Georgia – when it was Mikheil Saakashvili’s attempt to take South Ossetia by force that started the war – infuriates many Russians.

Russia's economy is in deep recession. Many Russians hope that rising oil prices will quickly restore the high growth rates their country enjoyed before 2008.

Does the Kremlin use energy as a political weapon? Why is Russia’s oil and gas output stagnating? Can and should the EU try to reduce its dependence on Russian hydrocarbons? Are the EU and Russia engaged in a pipeline war? What does energy solidarity mean? What rules should govern EU-Russia energy relations?

Few doubt that India's geopolitical role will grow. But what kind of impact will India make on the world's economic and political order?

There are two schools of thought on what the election of a new US president will mean for transatlantic relations. The optimists argue that relations will improve significantly.

During a trip to Israel in August, the only optimists I met were French diplomats. The reason for their upbeat mood? Ambitious plans by President Sarkozy for the EU to advance the Middle East peace process – including a controversial proposal that the EU should take the lead in creating an international peacekeeping force which could replace the Israeli army in the West Bank as part of a peace deal. But in the current inauspicious environment, can France, which currently holds the EU presidency, really help to move things forward and allow the EU to play a bigger role in the peace process? ...

When the EU expanded its membership in 2004, the UK was one of only three EU countries – Ireland and Sweden were the others – fully to open its borders to migrants from the ten new member states.