Civilizational Challenges to Russia's Sustainable Development

Abstract

The liberal model of globalization, proceeding from the “naturalness” of the unipolar world, essentially personifies the “modern barbarism”: sustainable development of the Western civilization is a priori meant to be at the expense of other countries. Today, its functioning is running into the resistance from local civilizations, whose economic and political weight has increased significantly in the 21st century, allowing the non-Western countries to become important actors in international relations claiming to realize their national interests and own type of sustainable development. Alliances are emerging among these countries, based on an alternative type of globalization, which implies both mutually beneficial cooperation and national development outside anyone’s external dictate. In fact, a global-local reality is being formed in the context of the multipolar world formation. The reaction of the West is to maintain its dominance by all means, holding back the creation of new international poles. These processes demand “rediscovery” of the established “universalist” approaches to sustainable development of human civilization: the problem of its alternative type has an independent scientific and practical significance for Russia as well as for the countries of non-Western civilization. In this regard, the study on the mutual influence of global and local factors that produce complex risks to sustainable development is being updated. Their complex nature is manifested in the fact that under the influence of hybridization of socio-techno-natural realities and inter-civilizational confrontation, they simultaneously cover a number of life spheres, overlapping each other, thereby acquiring an interference character. The author sees the answer to the challenges of these risks in the actualization of long-term functioning factors of a humanistic nature, which should be included in Russia’s strategy of a global-local sustainable development.