Russia will soon have another liberal ex-president. Twenty years ago this December, Mikhail Gorbachev stood in the Kremlin as the Soviet flag was lowered and replaced with the Russian tricolor. He sat down in the back seat of his limousine and was driven out the Borovitskaya gate, no longer president of the Soviet Union but instead a private citizen of the newly independent Russian Federation.

In March, Dmitry Medvedev, who has been president of Russia since 2008, will have a similar experience. He will surrender his office to his prime minister, predecessor and political patron Vladimir Putin, who after months of speculation has at last confirmed his intention to run for president on the ruling United Russia party's ticket. When Medvedev leaves office in March, he like Gorbachev will face the question of what role to play in his country's future. What becomes of a liberal ex-president in a decidedly illiberal state like Russia?

One thing is certain—Medvedev's welfare and personal security are assured as long as Putin remains in control. Medvedev has long been a close ally of Putin, and the latter is thought to have chosen him to become president in 2008 because of his unswerving loyalty. Thus, unlike former leaders in some other authoritarian states, Medvedev need not seek asylum abroad.

In fact, Medvedev has already telegraphed one likely possibility, namely that Putin's faith in him remains so great that he will continue to serve in the government, perhaps as prime minister. Putin may also define a new position for his protégé within the Russian government—for example, as chief justice of the constitutional court or in some high-profile international position, such as an ambassador at large for global security.

In any event, Medvedev's role in a future Putin-dominated government is likely to remain functionally similar to what it is today: evangelist in chief for Russia's modernization efforts, including the Skolkovo "city of innovation." Medvedev's voice could also continue to serve Putin's need for a popular lightning rod against corruption or in foreign policy as a spokesman and manager of the U.S.-Russia "reset."

If Medvedev is not given a formal appointment by his successor, he has another set of options altogether.

He can choose to follow the precedent set by Gorbachev, who also left office at a young age and well known for his liberal views—by participating selectively in political debates, possibly creating and leading a new political party or perhaps standing for office again in the next election, as Gorbachev did in 1996. Putin's predecessor and patron, Boris Yeltsin, was already in poor health when he left office in 1999, but even he spoke out occasionally on political and foreign-policy matters until his death in 2007.

Even without holding a formal office, Medvedev's voice will be influential. He could reach out to current and former political and business leaders and raise funds for favored causes. He could choose a signature initiative—most likely modernization—and create a nongovernmental organization to advance it, on the model of Gorbachev's Green Cross International or the Clinton Global Initiative. Other worthwhile causes might include combating corruption, environmental degradation, and drug and alcohol abuse, all of which cast a shadow over Russia's future.

Because he owes so much to Putin personally, Medvedev is unlikely to speak out as frankly or critically to Russian audiences about the Putin system as either Gorbachev or Yeltsin did. But he may have the opportunity to rise to a greater and more revered status internationally than he enjoyed as president if he chooses the path of ex-leaders like Vaclav Havel or Jimmy Carter, concerning himself with democratic development and human rights around the world. Even though he did not deliver perfect democracy and rule of law in his own country, the international community will surely welcome a prominent Russian voice to advocate these values.

Many outgoing presidents become obsessed with "legacy" to the point of wasting resources and political capital pursuing unrealistic or impossible goals during their last months in office. Thus far, Medvedev seems to have avoided chasing political rainbows. If anything he has refined his focus on concrete initiatives like Skolkovo and new campaigns against alcohol and tobacco use.

Perhaps Medvedev is keeping his head down, hoping that if he does not appear to threaten the system's stability, Putin will agree to keep him at the center of power, or perhaps even restore him to the presidency in 2018. Then again, maybe Medvedev has already defined his legacy and post-presidential role: offering Russians a bright vision of their country's future but accepting that the road to get there will be long and winding and that he may not himself be in the driver's seat.

Matthew Rojansky is the deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Emerging nation-states like Libya and Palestine are constrained by local elites integration in socio-economic networks.

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Attention is fixed on Mahmoud Abbas' application for Palestinian statehood at the United Nations, and on the capture of state power by Libyan rebels. Have we forgotten to ask whether and under what conditions the nation-state is a viable political vehicle for justice and liberation?

A world composed of nation-states is less than seventy years old. Yet the ideal of "national liberation" dominates the political imagination of many oppressed peoples. Such a politics of emancipation has dire limits because serious power is organised and exercised on a global scale.

Before World War II, the world was made up mostly of empires and colonies. A state of their own seemed to promise freedom and recognition to colonised populations. This is because the world of nation-states masquerades as a world of sovereign equals. Each nation-state supposedly rules its own territory and people, free from outside interference.

Only for the others

This was the ideology behind the United Nations, which was conceived and organised by the Western allies during World War II. The war aims of the US and the UK, as expressed in the Atlantic Charter of 1941, included the idea that all "peoples" had a right to self determination. Winston Churchill was quick to claim that this only applied to those in Nazi occupied Europe, not the subject peoples of the British Empire.

But Churchill was a man of the old world. Already the US had pioneered in Latin America and in its "open door" policies towards China modes of intervention and informal rule that recognised the political independence of subordinate states. The diplomatic historian William Appleman Williams used the term "Anticolonial Imperialism" to describe what the US was up to.

Empires always operate in and through some kind of local administration, whether a colonial state, a kept Raja, or an informal relation with a client power. In mature colonies, much of the day to day work of government was carried out by indigenous people, trained up as civil servants, police, and soldiers. Businesses were often operated and even owned by locals.

Occupying such a colony with imperial officials was not only expensive, it caused friction and generated resistance. Why not give local power brokers a somewhat larger cut (but not too large) to run the place for you? The oppressed "nation" could celebrate "independence", the local elites could enrich themselves, and the imperial power could continue to enjoy the advantages of domination and unequal economic relations.

This was not only empire without colonies, it was an empire that could pose as a supporter of "national liberation".

The United Nations took this concept of the nation-state to a global level. The world came to be composed mostly of small, relatively weak states, each proudly sovereign and jealous of its prerogatives. But each one also enmeshed in the brutal and shocking disparities of wealth and power that have characterised global politics since the nineteenth century. Local elites prospered, while their people toiled away at subsistence level.

A nation-state organisation of the world offers advantages to those who want to sustain global hierarchies of power. It also poses immense challenges to those struggling for freedom.

The immediate problem is which group or set of interests will seize state power. Colonial borders encased many different peoples within the same territory, and divided others. Colonisation produced sectors of society which benefitted from and were in sympathy with imperial power in varying degrees. The result is intractable and recurring clashes of identity and interest.

These conflicts are evident now in Libya and they have fractured the Palestinian national liberation movement.

"Imagined Community"

Even in Europe, there was no "nation" behind the state to begin with. In myriad ways state power was used to create the "imagined community" of the nation, which often enough was a fiction propagated by a dominant ethnicity or social class.

It is one thing to build a nation-state while rising to world dominance, as in the West. It is quite another to do so when you are on the losing end of global inequities in wealth and power.

New holders of state power in the global South - even in a rich state like Libya - are profoundly constrained and face limited options. Local elites are often deeply enmeshed in economic, cultural and political networks that tie them to foreign powers and interests, Western or otherwise.

The usual outcome is some kind of neo-colony. A local political and economic class benefits from relations with outside powers and global elites, to the neglect of the ordinary people who brought them to power and of their political desires.

Such an arrangement takes many forms. One model is the resource rich country, which can sustain a hyper-wealthy elite, while keeping the masses in check with a combination of repression and bread and circuses. This is the likely fate of Libya, if it does not descend into internal conflict over the possession of state power and its benefits.

Another model is that of South Africa's Bantustans, "tribal" states that were given limited "independence". Their function was to outsource security. Like the Palestinian Authority, the Bantustans self-policed a restive population. They also served as a basis for the power and wealth of a local ruling class, connecting it to the larger order that oppressed everyone else.

None of this is to suggest that people seeking liberation should not seek state power. Among other things, the state has the potential to equal the scales between the public good and the private power of capital, foreign or domestic.

But it is to say that the seizure of state power cannot be the end goal of contemporary liberation politics. In the global South, to have a politics only about the nation-state is to play a game with dice loaded against you.

A liberation politics beyond the nation-state would from the beginning reach out to those in other societies struggling also for a just global order. In so much of both the global South and North right now, politics has been reduced to the servicing of narrow interests by cronies holding offices of state.

People around the world are suffering through the nadir of capitalism that is our times. Such circumstances offer possibilities for a local-global politics of liberation.

It is in the global South that liberation movements have the best chance of seizing local state power and its many advantages. At the same time, connections with global struggles for justice will give the free states of the South an international base, a source of power with which to resist becoming a neo-colony.

For it is ultimately only a just global order that long can sustain freedom and equality at home.

Tarak Barkawi is Senior Lecturer in the Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

This paper, written for a September 2011 seminar hosted by the Geneva Center for Security Policy,  analyzes developments since the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Action Plan was adopted by concensus at the 2010 NPT Review conference. The seminar included participants from the Permanent Missions to the Conference on Disarmament, academia, and non-governmental organizations. 

An excerpt from the text, pg. 1:

"The first thing to keep in mind is that the previous Review Conference, in 2005, was a major failure. It was not the first review conference not to end up with a final document. The 1980, 1990 had failed to produce a final document agreed upon by consensus and even the historically successful 1995 review and extension conference ended up with a document which replaced the word consensus with the recognition that “a majority exists”. However, the 2005 Review Conference was widely perceived as “the biggest failure in the history of this Treaty.” Since then, the two North Korean nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009, the concerns about the Iranian nuclear program, the Syrian site of Al Kibar as well as the suspicions over the Burmese nuclear activities have fueled and renewed fears about further spread of nuclear weapons and, even, a possible collapse of the non-proliferation regime. It is true that Iran and Syria related issues have rarely been discussed during the 2010 Review Conference. However, the memory of a historical failure combined with several proliferation concerns and a de facto new nuclear weapon state – North Korea –, which status under the NPT is still open for discussion, has led to consider that “failure was never an option”, as one representative stated at the closing of the conference."

Russia watchers in the West cannot be surprised that Vladimir Putin is on his way back to the Russian presidency. Dmitri Medvedev was always his protégé, and there was no doubt that major decisions could not be made without his approval. This includes signing the New START arms control treaty, cooperating with NATO in Afghanistan and supporting U.N. sanctions on Iran — all of which should provide reassurance that Putin’s return won’t undo the most important accomplishments of the U.S.-Russia “reset.”

Yet the relationship with the West will inevitably change. For one thing, Putin can have nothing like the rapport his protégé developed with President Obama, which was built upon the two leaders’ shared backgrounds as lawyers, their easy adoption of new technologies, and their fundamentally modern worldviews.

The Bilateral Presidential Commission which Obama and Medvedev created and charged with advancing U.S.-Russia cooperation on everything from counterterrorism to health care may suffer. The relationship as a whole is not adequately institutionalized, and depends on the personal attention of Russian officials who will likely avoid taking action without clear direction from Putin, or who may be removed altogether during the transition.

Putin’s return to the presidency will also provide fodder for Western critics bent on portraying Obama and the reset as a failure, or dismissing Putin’s Russia as merely a retread of the Soviet Union.

These critics are wrong — today’s Russia bears little resemblance to what Ronald Reagan dubbed an “evil empire” — but Putin has been far more tolerant of Soviet nostalgia than his junior partner, and his next term will surely bring a new litany of quotations about Soviet accomplishments and Russia’s glorious destiny that will turn stomachs in the West.

Although he has spent his entire career within the apparatus of state power, including two decades in the state security services, Putin is at heart a C.E.O., with a businessman’s appreciation for the bottom line. Western companies already doing business in Russia can expect continuity in their dealings with the state, and it will remain in Russia’s interest to open doors to new business with Europe and the United States. The next key milestone for expanding commercial ties will be Russia’s planned accession to the World Trade Organization, which could come as soon as December.

At home, Putin faces a looming budget crisis. As the population ages and oil and gas output plateaus the government will be unable to continue paying pensions, meeting the growing demand for medical care, or investing in dilapidated infrastructure throughout the country’s increasingly depopulated regions.

This means that while Putin will seek to preserve Russia’s current economic model, which is based on resource extraction and export, he will be forced to assimilate many of his protégé’s ideas for modernizing Russia’s research and manufacturing sectors. Medvedev’s signature initiative, the Skolkovo “city of innovation,” will likely receive continuing support from the Kremlin, although it will have little long-term impact without a thorough nationwide crackdown on corruption and red tape.

Putin’s restored power will be strongly felt in Russia’s immediate neighborhood, which he has called Moscow’s “sphere of privileged interests.” Even though Kiev has renewed Russia’s lease on the Black Sea Fleet’s Sevastopol base through 2042 and reversed nearly all of the previous government’s anti-Russian language and culture policies, Ukraine is unlikely to win a reprieve from high Russian gas prices. Putin will also continue to press Ukraine to join the Russia-dominated customs union in which Kazakhstan and Belarus already participate. He may also take advantage of Belarus’s deepening economic isolation and unrest to oust President Aleksandr Lukashenko in favor of a more reliable Kremlin ally.

Putin and Medvedev have been equally uncompromising toward Georgia. Both are openly contemptuous of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, and it is unlikely that any progress on relations can occur until Georgia’s presidential transition in 2013.

Putin has good reason to continue backing NATO operations in Afghanistan to help stem the flow of drugs, weapons and Islamism into Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia itself. Moreover, as China extends its economic hegemony into Central Asia, he may find America to be a welcome ally.

Putin appreciates the advantages of pragmatic partnerships and will seek to preserve the influence of traditional groupings like the U.N. Security Council and the G-8 while at the same time promoting alternatives like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Brics.

The succession from Putin to Medvedev and back again was decided behind closed doors, and the formal transition of power is likely to take place with similar discipline. This should offer the West and the wider world some reassurance. Putin’s return to the presidency is far from the democratic ideal, but it is not the end of “reset.” Many ordinary Russians support him because he represents stability and continuity of the status quo and, for now, that is mostly good for Russia’s relations with the West.