Dinamiche geopolitiche contemporanee. Ce.St.In.Geo. geopolitical outlook 2024

[Autom. eng. transl.] Nos autem, cui mundus est patria velut piscibus equor. Although the child of an exile never fully accepted and written in an era that can only seem very distant to us, this passage from De Vulgari Eloquentia highlights an aspect of human nature that often tends to be forgotten, especially in a context like the current one increasingly dominated by Manichean visions that seem to leave no room for third-party positions, by the prevalence of particular interests over collective management mechanisms and by the reaffirmation of visions that exalt the sacredness of territory and borders. Those words, although written in an extremely different context, remind us that there are other horizons to which we can look and aspire. Horizons that geopolitical disciplines themselves - often accused of fomenting competitive logics based on deterministic assumptions - can help us understand better, by virtue of a composite and articulated nature that shuns one-dimensional and static analyses. In this context, the variety of interpretative lenses of geopolitics constitutes, therefore, an added value that today more than ever can provide interpretations capable of embracing the complexity and extreme fluidity of an international system in profound transition. It is starting from these bases that this volume intends to continue the mission undertaken by the Center for International Studies of Geopolitics over the last sixteen years: to look beyond borders - real and imagined - promoting a vision of the world capable of swaying beyond the immediate and of opposing rigid schematisms that are as fascinating as they are inadequate to understand the challenges and opportunities of the global context. It is on the basis of these considerations that the first chapter aims to decipher the main geopolitical dynamics that characterize the current world-system. In his analysis, Riccardo Redaelli focuses on the dynamics that characterized the long years following the end of the Cold War and the advent of the US-led unipolar moment, focusing in particular on the triangular relationship that linked (and at the same time opposed) Washington, Moscow and Beijing. A game of shadows within which a competition unfolds on multiple levels that directly affects a Global South that is much more complex (and much less available to be maneuvered) than is often believed. In his second chapter, Aldo Ferrari instead addresses one of the Gordian knots of the international context: the Russian-Ukrainian crisis. In doing so, he avoids an approach merely linked to the war plan, preferring a long-term analysis that looks at the evolution of Russian positions within the international context starting from the end of the Cold War. A choice, this, that allows us to place Moscow's geopolitical posture within a phase of profound transition, which has seen the country increasingly shift its center of gravity towards the east in the context of a process that has overturned the traditional European references of the Eurasian giant. The second part of the volume instead looks at one of the privileged loci of the analyses conducted by the Center for International Studies of Geopolitics: the Middle Eastern quadrant. The passages dedicated to the Islamic Republic of Iran (the third chapter edited by Giorgia Perletta) and Saudi Arabia (the fourth chapter edited by Giuseppe Dentice) present, in this sense, a specular structure: both aim to outline the changes that have marked the geopolitical agendas of Tehran and Riyadh during this first quarter of a century. This period is examined through a tripartite approach based on three historical phases, the first of which ideally opens with the tragic events of September 11, 2001, to po