Bøger i Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society serien

Ukraine is again-since its annexation of Crimea in February 2014 and the ongoing war in the Donbass-the stage of the largest crisis in Europe since the end of the Cold War. When it comes to understanding the resolution and prevention of complex hybrid conflicts, theories in international relations are trapped in their state-centered perspectives. Meanwhile, the role of the individual actor, alone or organized, often remains underestimated as political and moral agent. In this book, Marc Raphael Dietrich sheds light on a critical yet politically practicable notion of cosmopolitanism which centers on the individual and is framed by a set of universal principles, thus providing valuable alternative insights on the Crimea and Donbas conflict.

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.

In 2012, soon after his election to a third presidential term as president, following a four-year stint as prime minister (to avoid modifying the constitution), and in the wake of an unprecedented wave of popular protests, Vladimir Putin issued his ¿May Decrees.¿ Notable among them was the government¿s commitment to increase the salaries of doctors, scientific researchers and university teachers to double the average in their respective regions by 2018. But then on December 30 of that year, the government issued a ¿road map¿ for education, revealing that the salary increases in higher education would be paid for, not by significant new government funding, but by ¿optimization,¿ which would eliminate 44% of the current teaching positions in higher education. This was justified in part by a forecasted drop in student enrollment. Thus opened a new, accelerated period of reform of higher education. David Mandel examines the impact of these reforms on the condition of Russiäs university teachers and the collective efforts of some teachers, a small minority, to organize themselves in an independent trade union to defend their professional interests and their vision of higher education. Apart from the subject¿s intrinsic interest, an in-depth examination of this specific aspect of social policy provides valuable insight into the nature of the Russian state as well as into the condition of ¿civil society,¿ in particular the popular classes, to which Russian university teachers belong according to their socio-economic situation, if not necessarily their self-image.

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.

This timely book provides a comprehensive, multi-dimensional and comparative analysis of political uncertainty. It is innovative in introducing the notions of inter-institutional, verbally induced, and historical uncertainty. It argues for an inclusive approach which considers multiple aspects of uncertainty, even when they are of a different nature. Combining aggregate statistical analysis and qualitative case studies, it compares political uncertainty in established and non-consolidated democracies. Overall, this book furnishes important insights into uncertainty in political life and how the discipline of political science is coming to terms with it.

Following its declaration of independence in 1991, Ukraine has sought to produce a new national history. After the 2004 Orange Revolution, newly elected president Viktor Yushchenko embarked on an ambitious project to rehabilitate the most radical branch of the far-right interwar and wartime Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Their leaders were rehabilitated in an effort to affix them as central heroes in a thoroughly revised canon of Ukraine's past. This rewriting of history has required a highly selective rendering of those organizations' history, in particular with regard to their role in the Holocaust and murderous ethnic cleansing of Poles from Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943-1944. Juxtaposing the Ukrainian government's official representation of the OUN's leaders-such as Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych, Mykola Lebed, and Iaroslav Stetsko-with the emerging international scholarly research that has come to light since the opening of the archives, Per A. Rudling illuminates the deliberate blind spots of Ukraine's new national memory. His book contextualizes the sharply divergent remembrance of these groups in Ukraine and its neighboring countries-not the least, against the backdrop of the current impasse in Polish-Ukrainian relations.

This volume deals with legal issues concerning Russia's annexation of Crimea and intervention in the Donbas, so-called 'frozen conflicts' and 'hybrid warfare, ' the use of courts and tribunals to address armed aggression, and the implications of recent events for the security guarantees connected to nuclear nonproliferation.

The regions that once comprised the Soviet Union have been the scene of crises with serious implications for international law. Legal proceedings in connection with events in the post-Soviet space may be steps toward the resolution of recent crises--or tests of the resiliency of modern international law.