Assisting Reform in Post-Communist Ukraine, 2000?2012

Assisting Reform in Post-Communist Ukraine, 2000?2012 PDF Author: Duncan Leitch
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 383826844X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Duncan Leitch exposes the unexpected consequences of international aid for post-communist transitions. Examining the efforts to reform relations between Kiev and the regions of Ukraine, Duncan Leitch explores how and why fiscal decentralization and regional policy programs initiated by the Ukrainian government and supported by the Western donor community failed to achieve a sustainable outcome. Drawing on concepts from institutional theory, comparative politics, and development studies, Leitch explains the complex interactions between external donors and the domestic recipients of their advice. His findings shed light on the narrow circumstances under which short-term success can be achieved, but also point towards the failings of the donor community to lay the groundwork for lasting reform. A valuable resource for anyone working in the development sector in Eastern Europe or beyond, this book provides a new outlook on the political realities of the reform process, the relevance of international advice, and the domestic pressures leading to the Maidan uprising of 2013.

Assisting Reform in Post-Communist Ukraine, 2000?2012

Assisting Reform in Post-Communist Ukraine, 2000?2012 PDF Author: Duncan Leitch
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 383826844X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Duncan Leitch exposes the unexpected consequences of international aid for post-communist transitions. Examining the efforts to reform relations between Kiev and the regions of Ukraine, Duncan Leitch explores how and why fiscal decentralization and regional policy programs initiated by the Ukrainian government and supported by the Western donor community failed to achieve a sustainable outcome. Drawing on concepts from institutional theory, comparative politics, and development studies, Leitch explains the complex interactions between external donors and the domestic recipients of their advice. His findings shed light on the narrow circumstances under which short-term success can be achieved, but also point towards the failings of the donor community to lay the groundwork for lasting reform. A valuable resource for anyone working in the development sector in Eastern Europe or beyond, this book provides a new outlook on the political realities of the reform process, the relevance of international advice, and the domestic pressures leading to the Maidan uprising of 2013.

Ukraine’s Journey to Recovery, Reform and Post-War Reconstruction

Ukraine’s Journey to Recovery, Reform and Post-War Reconstruction PDF Author: Silviu Nate
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031664345
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description


Legal Change in Post-Communist States

Legal Change in Post-Communist States PDF Author: Kaja Solomon, Peter Gadowska
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3838213122
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Reformers had high hopes that the end of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union would lead to significant improvements in legal institutions and the role of law in public administration. However, the cumulative experience of 25 years of legal change since communism has been mixed, marked by achievements and failures, advances and moves backward. This book—written by a team of socio-legal scholars—probes the nuances of this process and starts the process to explain them. It covers developments across the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and it deals with both legal institutions (courts and police) and accountability to law in public administration, including anti-corruption activities. In explaining their findings, the authors probe the impact of such factors as the type of political regime (democratic to authoritarian), international influences (such as the European Union), and culture (legal and political). The volume’s contributors are: Mihaela Serban, Kim Lane Scheppele, Kriszta Kovacs, Alexei Trochev, Peter Solomon, Olga Semukhina, Maria Popova, Vincent Post. Marina Zaloznaya, William Reisinger, Vicki Hesli Claypool, Kaja Gadowska, and Elena Bogdanova.

Post-Soviet Secessionism

Post-Soviet Secessionism PDF Author: Daria Minakov, Mikhail Sasse, Gwendolyn Minakov, Mikhail Isachenko
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3838215389
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The USSR’s dissolution resulted in the creation of not only fifteen recognized states but also of four non-recognized statelets: Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Transnistria. Their polities comprise networks with state-like elements. Since the early 1990s, the four pseudo-states have been continously dependent on their sponsor countries (Russia, Armenia), and contesting the territorial integrity of their parental nation-states Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova. In 2014, the outburst of Russia-backed separatism in Eastern Ukraine led to the creation of two more para-states, the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR), whose leaders used the experience of older de facto states. In 2020, this growing network of de facto states counted an overall population of more than 4 million people. The essays collected in this volume address such questions as: How do post-Soviet de facto states survive and continue to grow? Is there anything specific about the political ecology of Eastern Europe that provides secessionism with the possibility to launch state-making processes in spite of international sanctions and counteractions of their parental states? How do secessionist movements become embedded in wider networks of separatism in Eastern and Western Europe? What is the impact of secessionism and war on the parental states? The contributors are Jan Claas Behrends, Petra Colmorgen, Bruno Coppieters, Nataliia Kasianenko, Alice Lackner, Mikhail Minakov, and Gwendolyn Sasse.

Russian Voices on Post-Crimea Russia

Russian Voices on Post-Crimea Russia PDF Author: Maria Lipman
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3838212517
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Russia has changed dramatically since the beginning of this decade. This volume presents a unique collection of articles by Russian scholars and experts, originally published in Russian in the journal Kontrapunkt (Counterpoint). The authors include Yulia Bederova, Andrey Desnitsky, Maria Eismont, Aleksandr Gorbachev, Tatiana Nefedova, Ella Paneyakh, Sergey Parkhomenko, Nikolay Petrov, Kirill Rogov, Sergey Sergeev, Ekaterina Sokiryanskaya, Andrey Soldatov, Svetlana Solodovnik, Anna Tolstova, Aleksandr Verkhovsky, and Natalia Zubarevich. Their essays cover a broad range of subjects from the Russian political scene and state-society relations to the politics of culture and the realm of ideas and symbols. These contributions offer fascinating insights into Russia’s multifaceted and complex development after the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm

Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm PDF Author: Steven Bottlik, Zsolt Berki, Marton Jobbitt
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3838213998
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Cold War’s bipolar world order, Soviet successor states on the Russian periphery found themselves in a geopolitical vacuum, and gradually evolved into a specific buffer zone throughout the 1990s. The establishment of a new system of relations became evident in the wake of the Baltic States’ accession to the European Union in 2004, resulting in the fragmentation of this buffer zone. In addition to the nations that are more directly connected to Zwischeneuropa (i.e. ‘In-Between Europe’) historically and culturally (Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine), countries beyond the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia), as well as the states of former Soviet Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan) have also become characterized by particular developmental pathways. Focusing on these areas of the post-Soviet realm, this collected volume examines how they have faced multidimensional challenges while pursuing both geopolitics and their place in the world economy. From a conceptual point of view, the chapters pay close attention not only to issues of ethnicity (which are literally intertwined with a number of social problems in these regions), but also to the various socio-spatial contexts of ethnic processes. Having emerged after the collapse of Soviet authority, the so-called ‘post-Soviet realm’ might serve as a crucial testing ground for such studies, as the specific social and regional patterns of ethnicity are widely recognized here. Accordingly, the phenomena covered in the volume are rather diverse. The first section reviews the fundamental elements of the formation of national identity in light of the geopolitical situation both past and present. This includes an examination of the relative strength and shifting dynamics of statehood, the impacts of imperial nationalism, and the changes in language use from the early-modern period onwards. The second section examines the (trans)formation of the identities of small nations living at the forefront of Tsarist Russian geopolitical expansion, in particular in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Southern Steppe. Finally, in the third section, the contributors discuss the fate of groups whose settlement space was divided by the external boundaries of the Soviet Union, a reality that resulted in the diverging developmental trajectories of the otherwise culturally similar communities on both sides of the border. In these imperial peripheries, Soviet authority gave rise to specifically Soviet national identities amongst groups such as the Azeris, Tajiks, Karelians, Moldavians, and others. The book also includes more than 30 primarily original maps, graphs, and tables and will be of great use not only for human geographers (particularly political and cultural geographers) and historians, but also for those interested in contemporary issues in social science.

Revolution and War in Contemporary Ukraine

Revolution and War in Contemporary Ukraine PDF Author: Olga Bertelsen
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3838210166
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
What are the reasons behind, and trajectories of, the rapid cultural changes in Ukraine since 2013? This volume highlights: the role of the Revolution of Dignity and the Russian-Ukrainian war in the formation of Ukrainian civil society; the forms of warfare waged by Moscow against Kyiv, including information and religious wars; Ukrainian and Russian identities and cultural realignment; sources of destabilization in Ukraine and beyond; memory politics and Russian foreign policies; the Kremlin’s geopolitical goals in its 'near abroad'; and factors determining Ukraine’s future and survival in a state of war. The studies included in this collection illuminate the growing gap between the political and social systems of Ukraine and Russia. The anthology illustrates how the Ukrainian revolution of 2013–2014, Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula, and its invasion of eastern Ukraine have altered the post-Cold War political landscape and, with it, the regional and global power and security dynamics.

Geopolitical Imagination

Geopolitical Imagination PDF Author: Mikhail Suslov
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3838213610
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
In his timely book, Mikhail Suslov discusses contemporary Russian geopolitical culture and argues that a better knowledge of geopolitical concepts and fantasies is instrumental for understanding Russia’s policies. Specifically, he analyzes such concepts as “Eurasianism,” “Holy Russia,” “Russian civilization,” “Russia as a continent,” “Novorossia,” and others. He demonstrates that these concepts reached unprecedented ascendance in the Russian public debates, tending to overshadow other political and domestic discussions. Suslov argues that the geopolitical imagination, structured by these concepts, defines the identity of post-Soviet Russia, while this complex of geopolitical representations engages, at the same time, with the broader, international criticism of the Western liberal world order and aligns itself with the conservative defense of cultural authenticity across the globe. Geopolitical ideologies and utopias discussed in the book give the post-Soviet political mainstream the intellectual instruments to think about Russia’s exclusion—imaginary or otherwise—from the processes of a global world which is re-shaping itself after the end of the Cold War; they provide tools to construct the self-perception of Russia as a sovereign great-power, a self-sufficient civilization, and as one of the poles in a multipolar world; and they help to establish the Messianic vision of Russia as the beacon of order, tradition, and morality in a sea of chaos and corruption.

Russian Active Measures

Russian Active Measures PDF Author: Olga Bertelsen
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 383821529X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
The contributions gathered in this fascinating collection, in which scholars from a diverse range of disciplines share their perspectives on Russian covert activities known as Russian active measures, help readers observe the profound influence of Russian covert action on foreign states’ policies, cultures, people’s mentality, and social institutions, past and present. Disinformation, forgeries, major show trials, cooptation of Western academia, memory, and cyber wars, and changes in national and regional security doctrines of states targeted by Russia constitute an incomplete list of topics discussed in this volume. Most importantly, through a nexus of perspectives and through the prism of new documents discovered in the former KGB archives, the texts highlight the enormous scale and the legacies of Soviet/Russian covert action. Because of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its on-going war in Ukraine’s Donbas, Ukraine lately gained international recognition as the epicenter of Russian disinformation campaigns, invigorating popular and scholarly interest in conventional and non-conventional warfare. The studies included in this collection illuminate the objectives and implications of Russia’s attempts to ideologically subvert Ukraine as well as other nations. Examining them through historical lenses reveals a cultural clash between Russia and the West in general.

Urban Protest

Urban Protest PDF Author: Arve Hansen
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3838214951
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Urban space is an important part of the political environment—a place where people congregate to discuss, deliberate, and interact with each other. In times of great public discontent, people often turn to urban spaces to make their opinions heard and to demand change, with varying degrees of success. How are mass protests affected by the urban public space in which they occur? This book provides a theoretical model to analyze city spaces, based on the use of theories from political science, urban planning, and sociology. Hansen’s approach consists of a mapping of the causal mechanisms between spatial elements, the political environment, and their combined effects on protests. This mapping is applied to three case studies—Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow. In addition to the spatial perspective model, Urban Protest provides new insights as to how the interactions in space occur, and demonstrates how geography can create limitations and opportunities in a large variety of ways.