The Baltic States Lane, Thomas
2013, 2002, 20131105, 2013-11-05, 20020101
eBook
Since the end of the Cold War there has been an increased interest in the Baltics. The Baltic States brings together three titles, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, to provide a comprehensive and ...analytical guide integrating history, political science, economic development and contemporary events into one account. Since gaining their independence, each country has developed at its own pace with its own agenda and facing its own obstacles. The authors examine the tensions accompanying a post-communist return to Europe after the long years of separation and how each country has responded to the demands of becoming a modern European state. Estonia was the first of the former Soviet republics to enter membership negotiations with the European Union in 1988 and is a potential candidate for the next round of EU expansion in 2004. Lithuania and Latvia have also expressed their desire for future membership of NATO and the EU.
Part 1: Estonia 1. 'One Day There Will Be an Estonian State.' 2. The Long Second World War: Estonia under Occupation 1940-1991 3. Old Wine in New Bottles: The Politics of Independence 4. 'The Little Country that Could.': Estonia's Economic Return to Europe 5. 'The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.': Foreign Policy Between East and West Part 2: Latvia 6. A Historical Introduction to Modern Latvia 7. Latvia's Politics, 1987-1991: The Thorny Road Towards Independence 8. Latvia's Democracy Examined: 1991-1999 9. Latvia's Economy since 1991 10. The Foreign Policy of Latvia 11. Conclusions Part 3: Lithuania, Revival and Repression 1914-1985 12. Independent Lithuania between Wars 13. Sovietization 1940-1985 Part 4: Lithuania, Independence and the Politics of Transition 1985 - 1999 14. The Achievement of Independence 1985-1991 15. Government and Politics in Independent Lithuania 16. The Lithuanian Economy after Independence 17. Lithuania's Foreign and National Security Policy
David J. Smith is a lecturer in Contemporary History and International Relations and a member of the Baltic Research Unit at the Department of European Studies, University of Bradford, UK. Artis Pabriks is a lecturer at the University of Latvia and Vidzeme University College, Latvia and a frequent political analyst for Latvia's mass media. Aldis Purs is a lecturer at Vidzeme University College, Latvia, having previously compteted a Research Fellowship at the Woddorwo Wilson Centre for International Studies, USA. Thomas Lane is a lecturer in European history and a member of the Baltic Research Unit at the Department of European Studies, University of Bradford, UK.
The current conflict in Ukraine has spawned the most serious crisis between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War. It has undermined European security, raised questions about NATO's ...future, and put an end to one of the most ambitious projects of U.S. foreign policy -- building a partnership with Russia. It also threatens to undermine U.S. diplomatic efforts on issues ranging from terrorism to nuclear proliferation. And in the absence of direct negotiations, each side is betting that political and economic pressure will force the other to blink first. Caught in this dangerous game of chicken, the West cannot afford to lose sight of the importance of stable relations with Russia.This book puts the conflict in historical perspective by examining the evolution of the crisis and assessing its implications both for the Crimean peninsula and for Russia's relations with the West more generally. Experts in the international relations of post-Soviet states, political scientists Rajan Menon and Eugene Rumer clearly show what is at stake in Ukraine, explaining the key economic, political, and security challenges and prospects for overcoming them. They also discuss historical precedents, sketch likely outcomes, and propose policies for safeguarding U.S.-Russia relations in the future. In doing so, they provide a comprehensive and accessible study of a conflict whose consequences will be felt for many years to come.
This unique work provides the only sustained political history of independent Kyrgyzstan, explaining events in the context of its society and the broader international order. Drawing on three decades ...of personal encounters with ordinary citizens and leading public figures, Eugene Huskey takes readers on a journey through the unlikely birth and tumultuous development of Central Asia’s most open society. Starting with the heady, romantic first days of independence and moving through the popular uprisings and inter-ethnic violence of recent years, he chronicles the struggles of a new state to establish a democratic order and to find its place in the international community, while caught between China, the Middle East, and the Russian world. At the center are the very human stories of leaders and citizens trying to navigate the transition from communism, where identities, property, and the rules of the political game were constantly in dispute. With citizens of independent Kyrgyzstan stripped of their Soviet identity, the book illustrates how alternative loyalties based on kinship, geography, statehood, and religion competed for prominence in ways that often complicated the new country’s political, social, and economic development.
Utilising cutting-edge theory and unique data, this book examines the role of power, culture, and practice in Russia's story of post-socialist economic change, and provides a framework for addressing ...general economic change.
No other book places power and culture as centrally as this, and in doing so it provides new insights not only into how Russia came to its present state under Putin, but also how economies operate and change generally. In particular, the importance of remaking authority and culture - creating and contesting new categories and narratives of meaning - is shown as central to Russia's story, and to the story of economies overall.
Power, Culture and Economic Change in Russia is an excellent research tool for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, political science, economics, area studies, and other related disciplines.
Gender, politics, and society in Ukraine Hankivsky, Olena; Salnykova, Anastasiya
Gender, politics, and society in Ukraine,
c2012, 20121231, 2017, 2012, 2012-12-31, 2013-04-02, 20120101
eBook
Gender, Politics, and Society in Ukraine is particularly innovative in its exploration of both women's and men's experiences and the ways in which gender relations shift over time in societies ...undergoing transitions to democracy.
The last two decades have been marked by momentous changes in forms of governance throughout the post-Soviet region. Ukraine's political system, like those of other formerly socialist states of ...Eastern Europe, has often been characterized as being "in transition," moving from a Soviet system to one more closely aligned with Western models. Anna Fournier challenges this view, investigating what is increasingly recognized as a critical aspect of contemporary global rights discourse: the active involvement of young people living in societies undergoing radical change. Fournier delineates a generation simultaneously embracing various ideological stances in an attempt to make sense of social conditions marked by the disjuncture between democratic ideals and the everyday realities of growing economic inequality. Based on extensive fieldwork in public and private schools in the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv,Forging Rights in a New Democracyexplores high-school-aged students' understanding of rights and justice, and the ways they interpret and appropriate discourses of citizenship and civic values in the educational setting and beyond. Fournier's rich ethnographic account assesses the impact on the making of citizens of both formal and informal pedagogical practices, in schools and on the streets. Chronicling her subjects' encounters with state representatives and "violent entrepreneurs" as well as their involvement in peaceful protests alongside political activists, Fournier demonstrates the extent to which young people both reproduce and challenge the liberal discourse of rights in ways that illuminate the everyday paradoxes of market democracy. By tracking students' active participation in larger contests about the nature of liberty and entitlement in the context of redefined rights, her book provides insight into emergent configurations of citizenship in the New Europe.
A number of large-scale transformations have shaped the economy, polity and society of India over the past quarter century. This book provides a detailed account of three that are of particular ...importance: the advent of liberal economic reform, the ascendance of Hindu cultural nationalism, and the empowerment of historically subordinate classes through popular democratic mobilizations.
Filling a gap in existing literature, the book goes beyond looking at the transformations in isolation, managing to:
Explain the empirical linkages between these three phenomena
Provide an account that integrates the insights of separate disciplinary perspectives
Explain their distinct but possibly related causes and the likely consequences of these central transformations taken together
By seeking to explain the causal relationships between these central transformations through a coordinated conversation across different disciplines, the dynamics of India's new political economy are captured. Chapters focus on the political, economic and social aspects of India in their current and historical context. The contributors use new empirical research to discuss how India's multidimensional story of economic growth, social welfare and democratic deepening is likely to develop. This is an essential text for students and researchers of India's political economy and the growth economies of Asia.
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This book applies postcolonial theory to Russia by looking at it as a subaltern empire. It pushes postcolonial studies and constructivist International Relations towards an uneasy dialogue, ...which produces tensions and reveals multiple blind spots in both approaches. A critical re-evaluation of the existing literature enables the author to produce a comprehensive account of how Russia's position in the international system has conditioned its domestic development, and how this in turn generated specific foreign policy outcomes. Having internalised the Eurocentric worldview, Russia is nevertheless different from the core European countries. This difference is not determined by 'culture', but rather by uneven and combined development of global capitalism, in which Russia is integrated as a semi-peripheral nation. The Russian state has colonised its own periphery on behalf of the Western core, but has never been able to overcome economic and normative dependency on the West. The peculiar dialectic of the subaltern and the imperial during the post-Soviet period has given rise to a regime which claims to defend 'genuine Russian values', while in fact there is nothing behind this new traditionalism but the negation of Western hegemony. Trying to 'defend' the nation from the postulated threat of Western interventionism, the regime engages in a disavowal of politics and thus suppresses popular subjectivity. The only political subject that remains on the horizon of Russian politics is the West, while the Russian people, as any other subaltern, are being spoken for, and thus silenced, by the country's Eurocentric elites and the Western intellectuals.
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Pushing postcolonial studies and constructivist International Relations towards an uneasy dialogue, this book looks at Russia as a subaltern empire. It demonstrates how the dialectic of the subaltern and the imperial has produced a radically anti-Western regime, which nevertheless remains locked in a Eurocentric outlook.
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1. The Postcolonial and the Imperial in the Space and Time of World Politics
2. Russia in/and Europe: Sources of Ambiguity
3. Material Dependency: Postcolonialism, Development and Russia's 'Backwardness'
4. Normative Dependency: Putinite Paleoconservatism and the Missing Peasant
5 The People are Speechless: Russia, the West and the Voice of the Subaltern
6. Conclusion
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Viatcheslav Morozov is Professor of EU-Russia Studies at the University of Tartu. Before moving to Estonia in 2010, he taught for thirteen years at the St Petersburg State University, Russia. He is the author of Russia and the Others: Identity and Boundaries of a Political Communit y and the editor of Decentring the West: The Idea of Democracy and the Struggle for Hegemony .
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.
