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The shockwaves emanating from Russia's invasion of Ukraine have fundamentally unsettled the peace in Europe, exposing vulnerabilities and forcing geopolitical recalibrations. While much scholarly attention has focused on the conflict's European dimensions, this paper examines its underexplored implications for East Asia and the burgeoning Russia-North Korea security partnership. Drawing on the existing scholarship on authoritarian alignment, we analyze the evolution of their relationship to uncover the mechanisms by which the two states have forged strategic partnerships that transcend traditional bilateralism. We argue that this partnership not only redefines Russia-North Korea ties but also signals the emergence of a broader alignment involving China and Iran. We contend that this collaboration poses a major challenge to the architecture of post-war East Asian security.

In his seminal work, Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations, Robert W. Cox reflects upon Gramsci’s political ontology. Analyzing how Gramsci reasoned about the relationship between civil society and the state, he explores the ways in which Gramsci’s conceptualization could be adapted to international relations studies. With a particular focus on the concept of hegemony, Cox maintains that just as hegemonic relationships are formed among social classes within the state, similar structures may be found in the larger global framework. By adopting the Coxian approach, this essay attempts to apply Gramsci’s notion of a historical bloc to the analysis of the post-Cold War world order and the rise of China as a viable architect of a new international governance model. It thus maintains that the contemporary global economic and political developments indicate the ongoing formation of an alternative historical bloc which, despite currently falling short of Gramsci’s conceptualization of imminent radical change, signifies major implications for inter-state relations and world peace and security.

This study offers a geopolitical case analysis on regional integration in Northeast Asia (NEA) within the context of the larger community-making process in East Asia. It argues that overcoming reluctant regionalism in East Asia is contingent on the formation of a viable region in NEA to complement the ongoing ASEAN-led regional dialogue. It observes that the frustrating region-making experience in East Asia is, in part, an outcome of the reluctance on part of the three core states of China, Japan, and South Korea toward forming a sub-region in NEA, due mostly, to extraneous factors that have resulted in political inaction and lack of sustainable institutionalization. This article, in this respect, identifies a number of contemporary geopolitical developments which may weaken the externally imposed impediments on regional integration and encourage deeper reconciliation among the three Northeast Asian states, thereby helping overcome reluctant regionalism in East Asia.

In this article, we examine the energy nexus in China–Russia strategic relations. We find that, over the past few years, the two countries have taken concrete steps to reinforce partnership in other strategic issue areas. Energy, in this respect, has been utilized as an effective policy instrument to deal with immediate challenges such as the Ukrainian crisis and the South China Sea disputes. We argue that cooperation in energy helps the two countries adopt common positions toward non-energy related issues and facilitate long-term deeper interaction. We thus maintain that energy will occupy an increasingly central position as China and Russia continue to seek to align their strategies more comprehensively against the backdrop of the evolving geopolitical environment by working to overcome existing disagreements and exploring new areas of cooperation.

Informed by the ongoing structural shifts in inter-state relations, this study proposes Critical Theory of International Relations (CTIR) as a framework to analyze China’s foreign policy doctrine. It holds that the critical method best reflects China’s conceptualization of international relations due to its emphasis on the state’s principal function to lead historical progress and emancipation, as opposed to traditional theories which either ignore the state and give priority to sub-state or supra-state structures, or do not recognize its potential to serve as an emancipatory agency. This essay, in this respect, represents an introductory attempt to apply CTIR to contemporary international relations, maintaining that China’s material and ideational emergence signifies a radical transformation of the post-war global order and the role of the state.

The focus of this article is two-pronged. First, it highlights China's 'One Belt, One Road' (OBOR) initiative as a Eurasia-centred project that, distinct from the twentieth-century Eurasianism, aims to introduce a new comprehensive integrationist agenda to the Eurasian strategic landscape. Second, it compares the US-led Euro-Atlanticism and the emerging Eurasianism, holding that while the former has historically stressed security over development (development is seen as contingent on the establishment of a hard security regime), the latter prioritises development over security (security is viewed as contingent on the establishment of an inclusive economic regime). Thus, this research argues that, if implemented successfully, OBOR could challenge Euro-Atlanticism as the long-held normative paradigm of interstate relations by offering a systemic alternative.

The Iranian nuclear energy program has remained a contested issue since the early 1990s, dividing international community into two opposing camps. On the one side, the US and its major partners argue that Iran's nuclear program is not for peaceful purposes and if Tehran insists on nuclear development, punitive action must be taken. On the other side, China and Russia maintain that a difference between nuclear technology for civilian and military purposes must be made. Thus, they argue, whereas all nuclear proliferation activities by non-nuclear countries must be prevented, states should be allowed to acquire nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. China, a major power in the opposing camp and Iran's largest energy partner, emphasizes that nuclear proliferation activities must be separated from trade in energy and that a rules-based mechanism must be set up to deal with the Iranian nuclear issue. This paper offers a comparative analysis of the US and Chinese policy toward Iran's nuclear energy program, attempting to shed light on the features of the two distinct approaches to what it calls the Iranian nuclear dilemma. It maintains that the disagreement stems from China's principle-based and economics-driven Persian Gulf strategy which conflicts with US hegemony-based and security-driven policy to the region. It holds that while the Iranian nuclear dilemma requires China to take steps to safeguard its energy interests in the Persian Gulf, it also provides Beijing with the opportunity to promote its vision of international governance based on harmony and mutual respect.

Accurate skull stripping facilitates following neuro-image analysis. For computer-aided methods, the presence of brain skull in structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) impacts brain tissue identification, which could result in serious misjudgments, specifically for patients with brain tumors. Though there are several existing works on skull stripping in literature, most of them either focus on healthy brain MRIs or only apply for a single image modality. These methods may be not optimal for multiparametric MRI scans. In the paper, we propose an ensemble neural network (EnNet), a 3D convolutional neural network (3DCNN) based method, for brain extraction on multiparametric MRI scans (mpMRIs). We comprehensively investigate the skull stripping performance by using the proposed method on a total of 15 image modality combinations. The comparison shows that utilizing all modalities provides the best performance on skull stripping. We have collected a retrospective dataset of 815 cases with/without glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA). The ground truths of the skull stripping are verified by at least one qualified radiologist. The quantitative evaluation gives an average dice score coefficient and Hausdorff distance at the 95th percentile, respectively. We also compare the performance to the state-of-the-art methods/tools. The proposed method offers the best performance. The contributions of the work have five folds: first, the proposed method is a fully automatic end-to-end for skull stripping using a 3D deep learning method. Second, it is applicable for mpMRIs and is also easy to customize for any MRI modality combination. Third, the proposed method not only works for healthy brain mpMRIs but also pre-/post-operative brain mpMRIs with GBM. Fourth, the proposed method handles multicenter data. Finally, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first group to quantitatively compare the skull stripping performance using different modalities. All code and pre-trained model are available at: https://github.com/plmoer/skull_stripping_code_SR .