Modern Research on Empires: Points of Consensus, Disagreement, and Prospects

The article is a scoping review of research dealing with empires, designed to assess the current state of research, identifying the main trends and the key gaps in the scientific knowledge on this topic. The most cited and relevant academic articles and books in English and in Russian were selected in the systems of Semantic Scholar, RSCI and the Cyberleninka scientific electronic library based on the keywords «империя» and «empire». Certain sources were included in the review following an analysis of the bibliography of the previously selected scientific articles and in accordance with the results of the ResearchGate portal search based on thematic coherence. The sources selected according to the above-described method were analyzed in order to identify prospective areas of research on the phenomenon of empires. These areas include modern manifestations of the imperial form of political organization, a comparative analysis of the development of former imperial spaces, as well as a clarification of the conceptual differences between the empire and the nation-state.