Kazushige Kobayashi is a doctoral student in International Relations at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Switzerland, and a research fellow with the Europe-Asia Programme at the Balkan Security Agenda in Serbia. He holds Bachelor of Economics from Tohoku University in Japan, Master in International Affairs from the Geneva Graduate Institute, and has also studied at University of California at Davis and Moscow State Institute of International Relations.
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Everybody wonders why I decided to live and work in Moscow. The first question I receive from new friends and colleagues here is always, Why Russia? Why leaving Japan behind? Why not enjoying lake and chocolate in Switzerland? Some think that I am very much fond of snow and cold weather. I am not. The others guess that maybe I am a vodka-lover. Well, maybe, sometimes yes. But it is not these allusions or fascination of mysterious Russia that dragged me into this great country. Rather, my first contact...
From 1945 to date, the southern Kuril Islands (particularly Iturp, Kunashir, Shikotan, and Habamai) have been a very frontier of Russo-Japanese battle of prestige. Over the last sixty-eight years, uncountable proposals to resolve the dispute have emerged from both sides; nevertheless, they all were torn apart by political unwillingness. Most recently, Japanese newspaper Asahi Shinbun reported on August 9 that the negotiation over the territorial dispute settlement would be reopened on 19 August in...
The Soviet Union did not lose the Cold War; it was the United States who lost the Soviet Union. After the Soviet disintegration, it was America who felt a huge hole of nostalgia in her heart while the U.S. remained an important global power to new Russia. Historically, the U.S. has built its unprecedented prosperity through strategically countering its prime enemy of each time; first it was the British Empire, then the Soviet Union after the World War II, and today the honorable seat of recognition...
The demise of the Cold War urged us to grow our brain out of the simplified friend-foe dichotomy. Reintegrating herself into an increasingly globalized world of the 21st century, Russia as well as any other country cannot think in an outdated framework of “you are either with us or against us.” Yet, we also must not dismiss the fact that there is a substantial difference between friendship and best-friendship. Therefore, for Russia to develop stable and favorable economic relations with...
The returning Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have successfully regain full control over the upper and lower congresses of Japan in July 2013; now they are equipped with an ever-mightier momentum and democratic mandate to push forward agendas of the most pressing national importance. In Russia as well as abroad, the result of Abe’s landslide winning provoked a variety of discussions; yet, a few international analyses have outlined how the election was...
Today’s global business faces a pressing call for incorporating social responsibility into a calculus of strategic profit making. Although good corporate citizenship has become one of universal criteria to access the overall success of any global firm, market share, along with profitability, remains as the most fundamental measure of global business performance and development. Business systems are conventionally designed to expand the market share in any given market, and failure to do so...
The worldwide financial meltdown of 2007 has triggered countless emotional responses at every single corner of the world. Fears marched and myths triumphed. Some claimed that all capitalist states are prone to be bankrupt (although states by definition cannot be bankrupt, strictly speaking) and others proclaimed that the recession is the new norm (but capitalism in today’s world is still alive and kicking). In the realm of international affairs and global governance, there has also been a fundamental...
At an international summer program of MGIMO (Russian Foreign Ministry Moscow State Institute of International Relations), more than a few professors mentioned that Russia and Japan are still technically “at the state of war” since there has been no conclusive peace treaty signed after the World War II. The statement brought an apparent surprise to many participants, although a majority of them were students and specialists in international affairs with specific expertise in Russian foreign...
