Decentering the Russian State

Decentering the Russian State PDF Author: Christopher Robert Ghazouly
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This thesis explores the processes and consequences of decentering the state in the Russian federation and the effects on local government. The methodology employed draws from the literature on decentralization, local government, political transitions and Russian Federalism and intergovernmental affairs. The study focuses on how Russia's regions between 1991 to 1995 were able to wrestle significant power and authority from the centre. It is argued that decentralization has increased the power and autonomy of the regional governments, while Russia's local governments have been left with few resources to administer the services downloaded to them. A case study of the Sakha Republic and the City of Yakutsk is employed to both demonstrate the increased role of regional administrations in post-Soviet Russian society, and to determine the degree of decentralization to the local level. A study of two housing projects is used to examine the effectiveness of regional and local decision-making and the delivery of services. The thesis concludes that the level of power delegated to Russia's local government, where responsibility for day to day administration is most salient, may serve as an indication of the overall level of reform in the Russian state.

Decentering the Russian State

Decentering the Russian State PDF Author: Christopher Robert Ghazouly
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
This thesis explores the processes and consequences of decentering the state in the Russian federation and the effects on local government. The methodology employed draws from the literature on decentralization, local government, political transitions and Russian Federalism and intergovernmental affairs. The study focuses on how Russia's regions between 1991 to 1995 were able to wrestle significant power and authority from the centre. It is argued that decentralization has increased the power and autonomy of the regional governments, while Russia's local governments have been left with few resources to administer the services downloaded to them. A case study of the Sakha Republic and the City of Yakutsk is employed to both demonstrate the increased role of regional administrations in post-Soviet Russian society, and to determine the degree of decentralization to the local level. A study of two housing projects is used to examine the effectiveness of regional and local decision-making and the delivery of services. The thesis concludes that the level of power delegated to Russia's local government, where responsibility for day to day administration is most salient, may serve as an indication of the overall level of reform in the Russian state.

Decentering Discussions on Religion and State

Decentering Discussions on Religion and State PDF Author: Sargon George Donabed
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739193260
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This volume explores dynamic conversations through history between individuals and communities over questions about religion and state. Divided into two sections, our authors begin with considerations on the separation of religion and state, as well as Roger Williams’ concept of religious freedom. Authors in the first half consider nuanced debates centered on emerging narratives, with particular emphasis on Native America, Early Americans, and experiences in American immigration after Independence. The first half of the volume examines voices in American History as they publicly engage with notions of secular ideology. Discussions then shift as the volume broadens to world perspectives on religion-state relations. Authors consider critical questions of nation, religious identity and transnational narratives. The intent of this volume is to privilege new narratives about religion-state relations. Decentering discussions away from national narratives allows for emerging voices at the individual and community levels. This volume offers readers new openings through which to understand critical but overlooked interactions between individuals and groups of people with the state over questions about religion.

Decentering International Relations

Decentering International Relations PDF Author: Doctor Meghana Nayak
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848139160
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Decentering International Relations seeks to actively confront, resist, and rewrite International Relations (IR), a heavily politicized field that is deeply centered in the North/West and privileges certain perspectives, pedagogies, and practices. Is it possible to break the chain of signifiers that always leads IR studies back to the US and its European allies? Through engagement with a variety of theories (ranging beyond the usual 'mainstream' versus 'critical/alternative' binary), and conversations with scholars, activists, and students, the authors invite the reader to participate in an accessible yet provocative experiment to decentre the North/West when we learn, study and do IR. In particular, they examine how the pressing issues of 'human rights', 'globalization', 'peace and security', and 'indigeneity' are simultaneously normative inventions meant to sustain particular power structures and sites for insurgent and subversive attempts to live IR at the margins. Selbin and Nayak have written a remarkable and provocative re-envisioning of a globally important subject.

Japan's Russia

Japan's Russia PDF Author: Olga V. Solovieva
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781621965534
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
Japan's Russia is a valuable resource that reinterprets modern Japanese culture and society and introducing readers to the rich intellectual and cultural history between Japan and Russia.

Decentering Musical Modernity

Decentering Musical Modernity PDF Author: Tobias Janz
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 383944649X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
This collection investigates the concept of modernity in music and its multiple interpretations in Europe and East Asia. Through contributions by both European and East Asian musicologists it discusses how a decentered understanding of musical modernity could be matched on multiple historiographical perspectives while being attentive to the specificities of local music and their narratives in East Asia and Europe. The essays connect local, global and transnational history with sociological theories of modernity and modernization, making the volume an important contribution to overcoming the Eurocentric dichotomy between western music and world music within the field of historical musicology.

Decentring the West

Decentring the West PDF Author: Professor Viatcheslav Morozov
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 140947464X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
We live in a world where democracy is almost universally accepted as the only legitimate form of government but what makes a society democratic remains far from clear. Liberal democratic values are both relativized by the self-description of many non-democratic regimes as 'local' or 'culturally specific' versions of democracy, and undermined by the automatic labelling as 'democratic' of all norms and institutions that are modelled on western states. Decentring the West: The Idea of Democracy and the Struggle for Hegemony aims to demonstrate the urgent need to revisit the foundations of the global democratic consensus. By examining the views of democracy that exist in the countries on the semi-periphery of the world system such as Russia, Turkey, Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil and China, as well as within the core (Estonia, Denmark and Sweden) the authors emphasize the truly universal significance of democracy, also showing the value of approaching this universality in a critical manner, as a consequence of the hegemonic position of the West in global politics. By juxtaposing, critically re-evaluating and combining poststructuralist hegemony theory and postcolonial studies this book demonstrates a new way to think about democracy as a truly international phenomenon. It thus contributes groundbreaking, thought-provoking insights to the conceptual and normative aspects of this vital debate.

The Ethnic Avant-Garde

The Ethnic Avant-Garde PDF Author: Steven S. Lee
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540116
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an "Afro-Cuban" voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.

Empire De/Centered

Empire De/Centered PDF Author: Maxim Waldstein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317144368
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
In 1991 the Soviet empire collapsed, at a stroke throwing the certainties of the Cold War world into flux. Yet despite the dramatic end of this 'last empire', the idea of empire is still alive and well, its language and concepts feeding into public debate and academic research. Bringing together a multidisciplinary and international group of authors to study Soviet society and culture through the categories empire and space, this collection demonstrates the enduring legacy of empire with regard to Russia, whose history has been marked by a particularly close and ambiguous relationship between nation and empire building, and between national and imperial identities. Parallel with this discussion of empire, the volume also highlights the centrality of geographical space and spatial imaginings in Russian and Soviet intellectual traditions and social practices; underlining how Russia's vast geographical dimensions have profoundly informed Russia's state and nation building, both in practice and concept. Combining concepts of space and empire, the collection offers a reconsideration of Soviet imperial legacy by studying its cultural and societal underpinnings from previously unexplored perspectives. In so doing it provides a reconceptualization of the theoretical and methodological foundations of contemporary imperial and spatial studies, through the example of the experience provided by Soviet society and culture.

De-Centering Queer Theory

De-Centering Queer Theory PDF Author: Bogdan Popa
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781526174659
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book historicises Anglo-American queer theory by excavating a rival epistemology that advanced a communist sexuality during the Cold War. It proposes a new dialectical theory that inserts socialist ideas and films in the epistemology of queer studies.

Life Is Elsewhere

Life Is Elsewhere PDF Author: Anne Lounsbery
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501747932
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 489

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Book Description
In Life Is Elsewhere, Anne Lounsbery shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called "the provinces"—a place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. Lounsbery looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature's representation of the nation's space. Using a comparative approach, she brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same? In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, Lounsbery argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficult questions about the symbolic geography of the nation as a whole. This constant awareness of a far-off European model helps explain why the provinces, in all their supposed drabness and predictability, are a topic of such fascination for Russian writers—why these anonymous places are in effect so important and meaningful, notwithstanding the culture's nearly unremitting emphasis on their nullity and meaninglessness.