The Eastern Partnership (EaP) initiative is a European Union (EU) project aiming to advance socioeconomic development in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. To date, virtually no research has been done on comparative welfare systems in these countries. This paper aims to narrow this gap. It is argued here that the comparative welfare state approach for the Central and Eastern European and Baltic Post-Communist countries is not appropriate for the selected region, since weak democratic institutions and economic underperformance contradict the primary foundations of the welfare state. The paper instead considers a welfare regime paradigm developed for less advanced nations. The empirical part of the study is based on the hierarchical and kmeans clustering method to analyse different welfare outcome and welfare effort indicators and on binomial logistic regression technique to analyse public attitudes towards welfare. The results of the study indicate that the welfare outcomes in EaP countries can be clustered into three distinct groups, but that using conventional welfare state variables, such as the total government outlay on welfare programmes, and welfare attitudes cannot explain the systematic determinants of varying welfare performance among the countries. It appears that employing the welfare regime framework, which more vividly takes into account the domestic and international activities of state, market and household, can increase the robustness of welfare research of the strategies employed by EaP countries to address their social risks. Nevertheless, the problems with data availability and reliability might restrict the comparative research framework to only a few specific social welfare dimensions.

Throughout the history of Albania’s foreign relations, perhaps no other bilateral alliance is more curious in nature than the Sino-Albanian entente. It was spurred by two leaders who have profoundly impacted and shaped the history of their perspective countries: Mao ZeDong leader of the Communist movement in China and Enver Hoxha, leader of Albania from the end of the second world war until 1985. Each political figure provided the impetus and philosophy for the formation of two subdivisions of political thought: Maoism and the lesser known Hoxhaism.

This unlikely alliance was initially characterized by shared ideology and mutual interests. Conversely, the entente between the two distant countries was also marked by a stark contrast in size, resources, and political might. This paper endeavors to examine the nature of the alliance and directly juxtapose arguments which purport the advantages and disadvantages of the relationship between the two countries. Although the alliance was short-lived, the momentary entente between China and Albania continues to shape the development of international relations to the present day.