630 Journal of the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies N. 5 / 2015 The publication of the work Energy and Geostrategy in 2014 marked the beginning of collaboration between the Spanish Institute of Strategic Studies (IEEE) and Spanish Committee of the World Energy Council (CECME). The excellent response to that first volume encourage those involved to maintain this fruitful cooperation for future years, with Energy and Geostrategy becoming an annual publication which periodically analyses the complex geopolitical reality of the global energy context. Developments which society has witnessed over the past year have confirmed the idea underlying the catalyst for this collaboration: energy and geostrategy are two concepts that will always be interlinked. This connection is one of the fundamental vectors for the understanding and interpretation of the present-day world. Many of the ideas that the authors presented in the previous edition not only still remain valid, but have been confirmed within the current scenario of international relations. Indeed, as we write, many of the conflicts that originated in 2014 are still alive, as is the case of the crisis in Ukraine, which has turned the spotlight on the fragility of the security of the European Union’s supply. The new Commission, under the leadership of Jean Claude Juncker, is immersed in a process of reformulating European energy policy which will give rise to the so-called Energy Union. The objective of this initiative is to counteract that fragility and, in turn, to broach such relevant issues as bringing about an internal energy market and to achieve an agreement on climate change at the 2015 Paris Conference. Russia, for its part, as a result of international sanctions and low oil prices, is going through a difficult moment in which it will no doubt be pondering the possible advantages of refocusing its energy policies on Asia. In an environment of low oil prices and in view of a relatively passive stance form Saudi Arabia, many of the oil-producing countries find themselves in a difficult situation, in which even the so-called «energy revolution » in the US, based on non- conventional, is affected. This further confirms the mutual relationship between geostrategy and energy, as in this case, a considerable variation in the market price of oil can have significant geostrategic consequences. Issues such as these, and many others of considerable relevance, are contained in the latest volume in the collection: Energy and Geostrategy 2015. Once again, the expert coordination of Claudio Aranzadi, former Minister of Industry and Energy and former director of the National Institute of Industry, has listed the events of 2015 in a pattern that continues on from the themes already broached in 2014 in order to convert the publication into a work of national and international reference in relation to the issue. Questions already dealt with in the publication Energy and Geostrategy 2014 , such as energy security, unconventional hydrocarbons or the role of China in the global energy scene, continue to dominate the present-day geopolitical context. For the 2015 publication three works have been selected that focus on territorial localisation: the Middle East (F. J. Berenguer), Russia (F. J. Ruiz) and the Arctic (V. López Ibor) and two of a transversal nature: energy nuclear (A. Colino) and the http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee
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