Jeremy Black’s article, “Towards a Marxist Geopolitics”, was published by the political science journal Geopolitics. Black’s text has undergone the peer-review process, which means that before the text was accepted for publishing, it was evaluated for quality by experts in the field of political science and, more specifically, geopolitics. Whereas this academic “stamp of approval” may be considered to be sufficient so as to consider an article to be of “high quality”, peer-review journals clearly do not accept every article that is sent to them for review. In this regard, Black’s specific text can be considered to be of quality to the extent that it takes prominent theories from political science, that of geopolitics and Marxism, and attempts to provide a synthesis of the two.

One of the reasons why Black’s text is of quality is because it clearly refers to previous academic literature on the subject. For example, with regard to the synthesis of geopolitics and Marxism, Black cites previous theorists in this area, writing “Immanuel Wallerstein and a host of scholars have been trying to (synthesize Marxism and geopolitics) at the global level, with the core-periphery model of economic development proving particularly influential.” (234) In other words, Black’s text can be considered to be one of quality since he references previous academic literature on his specific topic, i.e., the synthesis of Marxism and geopolitics. A quality text must be aware of previous literature that has gone before it and adequately quote this literature, so as to indicate a familiarity with previous interpretations of a given subject matter.

However, what about articles that are not printed in peer-reviewed scientific journals? Certainly, this standard provides a type of filter according to which it is easier to distinguish an article that has been well-documented and met the standards of academic research from those that have not. But this clearly does not mean that all articles which are not published in peer-review journals lack merit for the study of public policy and political science. For example, the article “A Time of Unprecedented Instability?”, an interview with the American strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski was published by the influential non-academic journal Foreign Affairs. This article bears significance in so far as it is a commentary on contemporary geopolitical events by an influential strategist in American government. As the article states, Brzezinski “has remained one of the most prominent strategic thinkers in the United States throughout the ensuing three and a half decades.” In other words, Brzezinski’s analysis of policy bears a significant weight, to the extent that he has historically and also currently remains a dominant voice in U.S. policy. Reading a text from Brzezinski provides the reader with insight into the possible directions of U.S. policy when considering his clear influence on this same policy.

With the advent of the Internet and the proliferation of voices, it is often hard to distinguish the quality of blog posts, which further complicates the researcher’s search for quality articles. Nevertheless, the article “Russian Nationalism and Eurasianism: The Ideology of Russian Regional Power and the Rejection of Western Values” by Matthew Raphael Johnson satisfies all the requirements of a quality journal article. He provides a concise and at once thorough review of Russian political ideology particularly through the lens of the gifted Russian theorist Alexander Dugin. Johnson’s text attempts to explain the clear ideological differences between U.S. capitalist policy and Russian conservative policy, thereby providing a corrective to many articles which simply demonize the latter without any critical thought, essentially functioning as mechanisms of American policy propaganda.

As Johnson writes at the beginning of his article “the recent flurry of writing on Russian politics, nationalism and Alexander Dugin  shows the contemptible inability of western savants to apprehend any idea beyond the cliche’s of stagnant neo-liberalism.”