Attempts by the international community to establish a comprehensive global framework for protection of foreign investment have not yet succeeded. The Russian Federation has remained aloof from these efforts. Its attention instead has been focused on the need to redesign its internal legal framework to accommodate the transition to a market economy. / The first aim of this thesis is to identify the major policy issues that inform the multilateral investment protection debate and to identify the motives that have influenced Russia not to participate. The second aim is to provide an analysis of the progress that the Russian Federation has made in reforming its internal legal framework to better accommodate and protect foreign investment and identify the deficiencies that still have to be addressed.

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Virtual Organizations (VO)—a network of independent organizations collaborating to address specific business opportunities—have become popular in today’s technology driven business environment. Due to their autonomous and interdependent nature, management of collaboration among such organizations is a challenging task. Although many solutions have been proposed over the past two decades to support inter-organizational interactions, VOs still face several challenges due to their dynamic and temporal nature that cannot be addressed by traditional solutions such as ebXML, RosettaNet and EDI. In this research, we present a framework for process management in service oriented virtual organizations and a distributed architecture for a flexible infrastructure that supports collaborative business process execution, monitoring and management. The framework contains 6 layers with multiple components within each layer. In designing the components of the framework, standard reference architecture such as the Open-EDI reference model and the S3 service oriented architecture, as well as best practices such as ITIL V3 and PMBOK are used. The infrastructure supports the common topologies of inter-organizational collaboration (e.g. peer-to-peer, star, linear), and responds well to changes due to its loosely coupled components. The proposed infrastructure is based on federating multiple SOA infrastructures with the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as its core. It is implemented using IBM WebSphere ™ products. We demonstrate that VOs built with our framework and implementation architecture facilitate flexibility, rapid process integration and dynamic evolution.

Computer networking researchers often have access to a few different network testbeds (Section 1.2) for their experiments. However, those testbeds are limited in resources; contentions for resources are prominent in those testbeds especially when conference deadline is looming. Moreover, services running on those testbeds are subject to seasonal and daily tra c spikes from users all round the world. Hence, demand for resources at the testbeds are high. Some researchers can use other testbeds in conjunction with the ones they are using. Even though each of the testbeds may have different infrastructures, and characteristics, in the end, what the researchers receive in return is a set of computing resources, either virtual machines or physical machines. Essentially, those testbeds are providing a similar service, but researchers have to manage the credentials for accessing the testbeds manually, and they have to manually request resources from different testbeds in order to setup experiments that span across different testbeds. This thesis presents GENICloud, a project that enables the federation of testbeds with clouds. Computing and storage resources can be provisioned to researchers and services running on existing testbeds dynamically from an Eucalyptus cloud. As a part of the GENICloud project, the user proxy (Section 3.4) provides a less arduous method for testbeds administrators to federate with other testbeds; the same service also manages researchers credentials, so they do not have to acquire resources from each testbed individually. The user proxy provides a single interface for researchers to interact with di erent testbeds and clouds and manage their experiments. Furthermore, GENICloud demonstrates that there are, in fact, quite a few architectural similarities between different testbeds and even clouds.

The subject of this work is the experience of Russia, forming the federal state, the lineament of Russian federation. The aim of the beginning of the work is to define the term „federation“, it is identified as the state, that consists of different territorial subjects disposing the powers of the central government, and these powers are limited by the constitution of federation. The sources of Russian Federation are discussed, the conclusion is made, that neither the USSR neither Russian Federation were federal states. The foundation of Russian federation is overviewed, the treaty of federation, signed in 1992, is discussed. Much attention is payed to studying the legal status of the subjects of Russian Federation. The conclusion is made, that Russia is the assymetrical federation and its subjects have no totally equal rights. While describing the institutions of the federation members, the author notices the dangerously diminishing independence of the local institutions from the federal government, a matter of great concern is the direct elections of the governor, abolished in 2004, and the new order, according to whom local governor is imposed by the President of the state, after the approbation of the local parlament. The status and the role of Federation‘s council is discussed, it is concluded that it is too powerless and needs reforms. The process of the affairs between Russian federation and its subjects is overviewed. In 1993 – 1999 members of the federation had much... [to full text]

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In this thesis the Russian Federation is investigated to understand if it still tries to continue its classic Soviet style of security perception in the post-Cold War era and its views concerning national security as reflected in Russia&#039 / s military doctrines. It is so obvious that the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emrgence of Russia as an independent entity in the post-cold war era have compelled the Russian Federation to redefine its national interest. In this context it experienced a crisis of describing its identity and national interests in changing security environment. Although in the early years of Yeltsin it preferred close cooperation with the West then abandoned this approach. It was implied that some states and coalitions were still main threats to the security of the Russian Federation in the military doctrine and the near-abroad policy re-gained importance. In addition with the inauguration of Putin as the Russian President the reaction of the Russian Federation regarding both internal and external security issues displayed the growing significance of traditional interests and old-style security issues. Thus in this thesis it is asserted that the Russian Federation still tries to sustain its well-known traditional interests the classic Soviet style of security perception in the post-Cold War period. Therefore this study tries to explain this argument through examining the effects of its imperial past, transformation years and its situation in the new security environment of post-Cold War era under Yeltsin and Putin.

This thesis aims to study the relations between Turkey and the Russian Federation in the post Soviet era. The thesis examines the political, military and economic aspects of the relations between these two countries in Eurasia. The thesis argues that economic factors have played a determining role in development of relations between Turkey and the Russian Federation in the post Soviet era. Contrary to the mainstream literature which suggests that the relations between Turkey and the Russian Federation are destined to be conflictual due to the geopolitical factors as well as the traditional distrust between them, the thesis shows that cooperation and trust between these two countries could develop further if both parties continue to take economic relations as the basis for improving their relations. There are six chapters in this thesis. The introductory first chapter is followed by the second chapter on the historical background of the relations between Turkey and the Russia. The third chapter examines the political relations while the fourth chapter discusses the security aspects of relations between these two countries. The fifth chapter explores the economic basis of Turkish-Russian relations in the post Soviet era. The sixth chapter is the conclusion.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the nature of Russian foreign policy towards Iraq in the post-Soviet era. This thesis argues that the Russian foreign policy towards Iraq in the post-Soviet era has been primarily determined by Russia&rsquo / s self-interests which are mainly defined in economic terms. The thesis follows the realist approach to international relations. It also emphasizes the importane of economic factors in foreign policy making process. The thesis consists of five chapters: In Chapter 1, the thesis is introduced. Chapter 2 explains the Soviet-Iraqi relations from a historical perspective. This is followed by Chapter 3 where Russian foreign policy towards Iraq under Boris Yeltsin is examined. Next, Chapter 4 discusses the Russian foreign policy towards Iraq under Vladimir Putin. Then, Chapter 5 assesses the economic factors, socio-political factors and international factors affecting Russian foreign policy makers in the post-Soviet era. The last chapter concludes the thesis.