№ 5 - 2006
Melville A.Yu.
“Political Atlas of Modern Time”: Conception and General Theoretical and Methodological Outline of the Project

There are 192 sovereign states in the modern world. All of them are members of the UN, but, at that, each of them has features exclusively of its own, occupies a particular place in the interdependent global community and is solving specific national tasks. How are such unique phenomena of the world politics as modern states, to be compared with one another? In what way are, in the comparisons of states of today’s world, particular features of their history and culture, the problems and challenges they are facing, their development levels and evolution trajectories, to be taken into consideration? How to secure scientific strictness of such comparative analysis? Trying to find answers to these and other such questions, a group of researchers have been working since the spring of 2005 at the “Political Atlas of Modern Time” project being realized by the Moscow State Institute (University) of International Relations, of the RF Foreign Ministry, and by the Institute of Social Designing (with support on the part of the Expert journal). As for the present material, it contains general characterization of the Project, exposes the hypotheses and the approaches of the researchers, which underlie it, as well as the methods of multidimensional comparative analysis of political systems and regimes of the modern world, that the authors’ group applies.