This book presents the changing roles of urban governments and how local governments struggle to gain administrative, fiscal, and political power to combat current urban challenges in Kazakhstan. ...Focusing on the cities and regions selected by the national government of Kazakhstan to be the drivers of national economic development, the author analyses the impact of decentralization on the role of local governments. The book examines the practical experiences of city and regional governments with an emphasis on urban planning, public investment in national projects, and management of urban transport. Due to the complexity and irregular distribution of political reforms at different levels of local government in Kazakhstan, three separate studies are presented, each looking at a specific aspect of decentralization reform and local government function related to physical urban development and distribution of public investment. The author argues that, if the national government of Kazakhstan wants to concentrate economic resources in urban agglomerations, it is not enough to assume that local governments are ready to play the role of efficient planners and managers of urban development. A useful analysis illustrating cities and urban conglomerations as engines of growth in economic development, this book will be of interest to academics studying Central Asian Studies, in particular political and economic development, Development Studies, and Urban Studies.
The making of a generation Andres, Lesley; Wyn, Johanna
The making of a generation,
c2010, 20101030, 2010, 2014, 2010-01-01, 2010-10-16, 20100101
eBook
"Secondary school graduates of the late 1980s and early 1990s have found themselves coping with economic insecurity, social change, and workplace restructuring. Drawing on studies that have recorded ...the lives of young people in two countries for over fifteen years, The Making of a Generation offers unique insight into the hopes, dreams, and trajectories of a generation."
"Although children born in the 1970s were more educated than ever before, as adults they entered new labour markets that were de-regulated and precarious. Lesley Andres and Johanna Wyn discuss the consequences of education and labour policies in Canada and Australia, emphasizing their long-term impacts on health, well-being, and family formation. They conclude that these young adults bore the brunt of policies designed to bring about rapid changes in the nature of work. Despite their modest hopes and aspirations for security, those born in the 1970s became a vanguard generation as they negotiated the significant social and economic transformations of the 1990s."--pub. desc.
From Kaliningrad on the Baltic to the Russian Far East, journalist Ben Judah has travelled throughout Russia and the former Soviet republics, conducting extensive interviews with President Vladimir ...Putin's friends, foes, and colleagues, government officials, business tycoons, mobsters, and ordinary Russian citizens.Fragile Empireis the fruit of Judah's thorough research: a probing assessment of Putin's rise to power and what it has meant for Russia and her people.
Despite a propaganda program intent on maintaining the cliché of stability, Putin's regime was suddenly confronted in December 2011 by a highly public protest movement that told a different side of the story. Judah argues that Putinism has brought economic growth to Russia but also weaker institutions, and this contradiction leads to instability. The author explores both Putin's successes and his failed promises, taking into account the impact of a new middle class and a new generation, the Internet, social activism, and globalization on the president's impending leadership crisis. Can Russia avoid the crisis of Putinism? Judah offers original and up-to-the-minute answers.
Mass mobilization is among the most dramatic and inspiring forces for political change. When ordinary citizens take to the streets in large numbers, they can undermine and even topple undemocratic ...governments, as the recent wave of peaceful uprisings in several postcommunist states has shown. However, investigation into how protests are organized can sometimes reveal that the origins and purpose of "people power" are not as they appear on the surface. In particular, protest can be used as an instrument of elite actors to advance their own interests rather than those of the masses.
Weapons of the Wealthyfocuses on the region of post-Soviet Central Asia to investigate the causes of elite-led protest. In nondemocratic states, economic and political opportunities can give rise to elites who are independent of the regime, yet vulnerable to expropriation and harassment from above. In conditions of political uncertainty, elites have an incentive to cultivate support in local communities, which elites can then wield as a "weapon" against a predatory regime. Scott Radnitz builds on his in-depth fieldwork and analysis of the spatial distribution of protests to demonstrate how Kyrgyzstan's post-independence development laid the groundwork for elite-led mobilization, whereas Uzbekistan's did not.
Elites often have the wherewithal and the motivation to trigger protests, as is borne out by Radnitz's more than one hundred interviews with those who participated in, observed, or avoided protests. Even Kyrgyzstan's 2005 "Tulip Revolution," which brought about the first peaceful change of power in Central Asia since independence, should be understood as a strategic action of elites rather than as an expression of the popular will. This interpretation helps account for the undemocratic nature of the successor government and the 2010 uprising that toppled it. It also serves as a warning for scholars to look critically at bottom-up political change.
Our collective memories of World War II and Vietnam have been shaped as much by memoirs, novels, and films as they have been by history books. InWelcome to the Suck, Stacey Peebles examines the ...growing body of contemporary war stories in prose, poetry, and film that speak to the American soldier's experience in the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War.
Stories about war always encompass ideas about initiation, masculinity, cross-cultural encounters, and trauma. Peebles shows us how these timeless themes find new expression among a generation of soldiers who have grown up in a time when it has been more acceptable than ever before to challenge cultural and societal norms, and who now have unprecedented and immediate access to the world away from the battlefield through new media and technology.
Two Gulf War memoirs by Anthony Swofford (Jarhead) and Joel Turnipseed (Baghdad Express) provide a portrait of soldiers living and fighting on the cusp of the major political and technological changes that would begin in earnest just a few years later. The Iraq War, a much longer conflict, has given rise to more and various representations. Peebles covers a blog by Colby Buzzell ("My War"), memoirs by Nathaniel Fick (One Bullet Away) and Kayla Williams (Love My Rifle More Than You); a collection of stories by John Crawford (The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell); poetry by Brian Turner (Here, Bullet); the documentaryAlive Day Memories; and the feature films In the Valley of Elahand the winner of the 2010 Oscar for Best Picture,The Hurt Locker, both written by the war correspondent Mark Boal.
Books and other media emerging from the conflicts in the Gulf have yet to receive the kind of serious attention that Vietnam War texts received during the 1980s and 1990s. With its thoughtful and timely analysis,Welcome to the Suckwill provoke much discussion among those who wish to understand today's war literature and films and their place in the tradition of war representation more generally.
What Muscovites get in a soup kitchen run by the Christian Church of Moscow is something far more subtle and complex-if no less necessary and nourishing-than the food that feeds their hunger. InNot ...by Bread Alone,the first full-length ethnographic study of poverty and social welfare in the postsocialist world, Melissa L. Caldwell focuses on the everyday operations and civil transactions at CCM soup kitchens to reveal the new realities, the enduring features, and the intriguing subtext of social support in Russia today. In an international food aid community, Caldwell explores how Muscovites employ a number of improvisational tactics to satisfy their material needs. She shows how the relationships that develop among members of this community-elderly Muscovite recipients, Russian aid workers, African student volunteers, and North American and European donors and volunteers-provide forms of social support that are highly valued and ultimately far more important than material resources. InNot by Bread Alonewe see how the soup kitchens become sites of social stability and refuge for all who interact there-not just those with limited financial means-and how Muscovites articulate definitions of hunger and poverty that depend far more on the extent of one's social contacts than on material factors. By rethinking the ways in which relationships between social and economic practices are theorized-by identifying social relations and social status as Russia's true economic currency-this book challenges prevailing ideas about the role of the state, the nature of poverty and welfare, the feasibility of Western-style reforms, and the primacy of social connections in the daily lives of ordinary people in post-Soviet Russia.
This book takes stock of arguments about the historical legacies of communism that have become common within the study of Russia and East Europe more than two decades after communism's demise and ...elaborates an empirical approach to the study of historical legacies revolving around relationships and mechanisms rather than correlation and outward similarities. Eleven essays by a distinguished group of scholars assess whether post-communist developments in specific areas continue to be shaped by the experience of communism or, alternatively, by fundamental divergences produced before or after communism. Chapters deal with the variable impact of the communist experience on post-communist societies in such areas as regime trajectories and democratic political values; patterns of regional and sectoral economic development; property ownership within the energy sector; the functioning of the executive branch of government, the police, and courts; the relationship of religion to the state; government language policies; and informal relationships and practices.
Why do strong opposition party organizations emerge in some democratizing countries, while those in others remain weak or quickly fragment on ethnic lines? This book offers an explanation for why ...opposition parties vary in organizational form, cohesion, and mobilizational reach. The book draws upon an in-depth analysis of three countries in Anglophone Africa: Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Kenya. Though these countries share similar institutional frameworks, including electoral rules, party development has taken a different route in each. The explanation emphasizes the ways in which historical legacies interact with strategic choices to produce different trajectories of party development. In terms of the role of history, the book argues that strong opposition parties are more likely where authoritarian states relied on alliances with corporate actors like labor. In these contexts, ruling parties armed their allies, providing them with mobilizing structures and political resources that could later be used to challenge the state. Secondly, opposition parties are more likely to maintain their organizational cohesion and the commitment of activists when they use strategies and appeals that escalate conflict and reorient social boundaries around the lines of partisan affiliation. Polarization forges stronger parties, but it also increases the likelihood of violence and authoritarian retrenchment. The book provides an explanation of why democratization in the hybrid regimes of the late Third Wave may prove more conflictual and more protracted than earlier transitions to democracy.
