This book is a novel contribution to the 'practice theory' turn in International Relations. It looks at practitioners' approaches to the EU's foreign policy to its eastern neighbourhood, particularly ...Russia, and offers a new methodology for capturing practices using the analytical approach of Discursive International Relations and the Discursive Practice Model. Drawing on data from the European Council, the European Commission and the European Parliament's AFET committee members, the study concludes that EU practitioners are concerned with the collective EU identity, normative and moral duties and collective security interests when considering EU policy towards Russia and other eastern neighbours. This suggest that practitioners are a lot more pragmatic when it comes to this policy area than previously assumed by the vast literature on the EU as a normative power.
This book offers the first environmental history of Russia’s steppes. From the early-eighteenth, settlers moved to the semi-arid but fertile grasslands from wetter, forested regions in central and ...northern Russia and Ukraine, and central Europe. By the late-nineteenth century, jlbjjbjthe steppes were the bread basket of the Russian Empire and parts of Europe. But, there was another side to this story. The steppes were hit by droughts, winds that whipped up dust storms, soil erosion, crop failures, and in the worst years - famine. From the late-eighteenth century, naturalists and scientists studied the steppe environment. Russian scientists came up with innovations, in particular, Vasilii Dokuchaev’s new soil science explained the fertile black earth as a product of the steppe environment in which it had formed. Scientists also studied environmental change, including climate change, and debated whether human activity or natural forces were to blame. They proposed remedies to the environmental barriers to farming on the steppes. For a long time, they focused on planting trees and irrigation, in attempts to make the steppes more like the homelands of the settlers. More sustainable were techniques of cultivation to retain moisture in the soil. Among the pioneers were Mennonite settlers. Such approaches aimed to work with the environment, rather than try to change it. The story is similar to the Dust Bowl on the Great Plains of the USA, which share a similar environment and environmental history. The story is also placed in the wider context of the environmental history of European colonialism around the globe.
A compelling study of "new sincerity" as a powerful cultural practice, born in perestroika-era Russia, and how it interconnects with global social and media flowsThe global cultural practice of a ..."new sincerity" in literature, media, art, design, fashion, film, and architecture grew steadily in the wake of the Soviet collapse. Cultural historian Ellen Rutten traces the rise and proliferation of a new rhetoric of sincere social expression characterized by complex blends of unabashed honesty, playfulness, and irony. Insightful and thought provoking, Rutten's masterful study of a sweeping cultural trend with roots in late Soviet Russia addresses postsocialist, postmodern, and postdigital questions of selfhood. The author explores how and why a uniquely Russian artistic and social philosophy was shaped by "cultural memory, commodification, and mediatization," and how, under Putin, "new sincerity" talk merges with transnational pleas to "revive sincerity." This essential study stands squarely at the intersection of the history of emotions, media studies, and post-Soviet studies to shed light on a new cultural reality-one that is profoundly affecting creative thought, artistic expression, and lifestyle virtually everywhere.
Development and Dystopia Minakov, Mikhail; Umland, Andreas; Etkind, Alexander
2018, 20180330, 2018-03-27, Letnik:
179
eBook
This book dissects—from both philosophical and empirical viewpoints—the peculiar developmental challenges, geopolitical contexts, and dystopic stalemates that post-Soviet societies face during their ...transition to new political and cultural orders. The principal geographical focus of the essays is Ukraine, but most of the assembled texts are also relevant and/or refer to other post-Soviet countries.Mikhail Minakov describes how former Soviet nations are trying to reinvent, for their particular circumstances, democracy and capitalism while concurrently dealing with new poverty and inequality, facing unusual degrees of freedom and responsibility for their own future, coming to terms with complicated collective memories and individual pasts. Finally, the book puts forward novel perspectives on how Western and post- communist Europe may be able to create a sustainable pan-European common space. These include a new agenda for pan-European political communication, new East-Central European regional security mechanisms, a solution for the chain of separatist-controlled populations, and anti-patronalist institutions in East European countries.
This is an in-depth look, including analysis of future hazards, at two lakes that are an important link in the Caspian-Baltic-White Sea waterway system. Their ecological state affects the water ...quality of the Neva River, the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea.
Wayward Shamans tells the story of an idea that humanity’s first expression of art, religion and creativity found form in the figure of a proto-priest known as a shaman. Tracing this classic category ...of the history of anthropology back to the emergence of the term in Siberia, the work follows the trajectory of European knowledge about the continent’s eastern frontier. The ethnographic record left by German natural historians engaged in the Russian colonial expansion project in the 18th century includes a range of shamanic practitioners, varied by gender and age. Later accounts by exiled Russian revolutionaries noted transgendered shamans. This variation vanished, however, in the translation of shamanism into archaeology theory, where a male sorcerer emerged as the key agent of prehistoric art. More recent efforts to provide a universal shamanic explanation for rock art via South Africa and neurobiology likewise gloss over historical evidence of diversity. By contrast this book argues for recognizing indeterminacy in the categories we use, and reopening them by recalling their complex history.
Russia held its first multiparty election in over 75 years in the hope that it would usher in a new democratic political order. However, the success of right-wing populist Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ...Liberal Democratic Party of Russia and other anti-reform forces shocked the world. This study analyzes the background, events and main players of the elections, and examines their significance for the Russian political system. Describing in detail the December 1993 voting, it provides historical, political, regional and sociocultural interpretations of the elections and their results. The work attempts to answer such questions as: what were the keys to Zhirinovsky's success?; who are the new players on Russia's political scene?; what role will the new institutions play in Russian politics; and who actually holds power in Russia?
Kin Majorities explores why communities like Crimea and Moldova engage with dual citizenship and how this intersects, or not, with identity. Analyzing data collected from Crimea and Moldova in 2012 ...and 2013, just before Russia's annexation of Crimea, Eleanor Knott provides a crucial window into Russian identification in a time of calm.
