Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues

This paper is partly devoted to defining economic warfare and its position in the system of international relations. The role of economic warfare in shaping internal and external policies of s country is described in selected examples using the historical-logical method. The article provides a typology of the elements of trade warfare. Based on the analysis of selected determinants, the latest facts of trade warfare after the year 2015 are analysed. The treatise concludes: a trade war in one sector of the economy may spread into other sectors, whereas economic warfare is a priori waged against an economy.

Our paper focuses on the issues of food security and agricultural trade. Specifically, we tackle the issue of economic selfsufficiency of a country using an example of the import ban on agricultural production as one form of economic sanctions. Our paper attempts to estimate the impact of sanctions in separate regions, rather then on the aggregate country level. We propose an original methodology of estimating allocation of import ban effects based on the OECD Customer Support Estimate (CSE). Our results demonstrate that in case of some agricultural products (e.g. potatoes) consumers in most of Russian regions were net beneficiaries before 2014, but the magnitude of the benefits decreased significantly after the introduction of sanctions. This provided Russian agricultural producers with more support arising from the market price differential. All in all, we find no significant evidence of the import ban impact, however after 2014 the cumulative cost paid by consumers in different regions declined significantly due to other factors, leaving consumers in the position of net beneficiaries. Our results demonstrate that despite the economic sanctions are important, they do not affect food security of neither of conflicting parties.

Our paper is dealing with the issues of economic security and international relations in the European Union (EU) at the uncertain times of rethinking European security and sustainability in the face of Brexit and other challenges facing Europe.

Ensuring security is one of the main functions of the state, therefore, in that area one has to deal with a wide range of threats and challenges. In the analysis of the changing security environment issues in the 21st century, it is reasonable to look at historical events and to do appropriate case studies. Lithuania in the interwar period can be considered as a very valuable case in the context of the analysis of threats to national security. Over two decades, Lithuania acquired the experience of the conventional warfare, encountered analogues of little green men, and went through military coups, civil unrest, and the consequences of economic sanctions (economic warfare); it was exposed to external intelligence and agents of influence of other states operating underground who spread subversive rumours and distributed underground newspapers and leaflets. The present paper focuses on the range of those issues.

The author presents a new European security environment after the “Cold War”, including not only the challenges and threats to the international security but also the essential conditions and problems of the European security evolution at the beginning of the 21st century. He shows the dynamic and constant changes taking place within the international environment and those related to the progress of civilization. Moreover, he stresses that current policy and security measures are not capable of effective action against having to appear before the new challenges and threats. Then the problem of unity and identity in the transatlantic relationship is taken. According to the author, in complicating sphere of the international conditions the role of multilateral institutions effectiveness in the international cooperation increases. Due to the increasing importance of interdependence and internationalization, European security challenges are European-wide and even transatlantic. Addressing them requires the preservation of unity that will be possible by strengthening common identity based on shared values and common interests.