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21. The Unique Evolution of the State in the Turkic Republics of the Caspian Sea

Author:
Mert Bilgin
Publication Date:
12-2004
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Uluslararasi Iliskiler
Institution:
Uluslararasi Iliskiler
Abstract:
Post-Soviet countries are either passing through a transition period, or have already completed it, as an outcome of the neoliberal pressures of international actors. The attempts have focused on reconstruction of the state because of its being conceived as an impediment in front of political and economic liberalization. The states of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan resemble other transition economies in the sense that they share a similar Soviet legacy. Nevertheless, they deviate from the rest by the virtue of natural resources which endow the state the ability to re-produce itself. The state of Azerbaijan has liberated itself from the society by using the natural resource rents, which in turn outmode taxation as an instrument of revenue. Despite Kazakhstan's discernible progress in launching economic reforms, the state has politically kept its solid structure. The Kazakh state has preferred to allocate the natural gas revenues for economic transformation with no political liberalization. Under an autocratic regime, the Turkmen state has strengthened its positioning vis-à-vis the society with no economic and political transformation.
Topic:
Communism, Development, and Economics
Political Geography:
Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Soviet Union, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan

22. Social and Economic Decline as Factors in Conflict in the Caucasus

Author:
Svetlana Glinkina and Dorothy Rosenberg
Publication Date:
02-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
We argue that the conflicts in the Caucasus are the result of the abrogation by the elite of the earlier, Soviet era, social contract. This process was accompanied by the collapse of the formal economy; evidenced by huge national income compression, falling public goods provision, and growing inequality and poverty. In the absence of state provision of basic amenities and governance, ordinary people are compelled to fall back on kinship ties. Declining standards of governance facilitate state-sponsored corruption and criminality in a setting where the shadow economic activity is increasingly important to individual survival strategies. Oil pipelines and the right to control the transit of goods both legal and illegal also underlie conflict in the region. Criminality has replaced ethnicity as the major motivation for conflict and conflict per se has become a lucrative source of income.
Topic:
Economics, Ethnic Conflict, and Poverty
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Asia, and Soviet Union

23. National Security Decision Making, Formal vs. Informal Procedures and Structures: Case Study 1 - The Former Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine

Author:
Yuri Nazarkin
Publication Date:
08-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF)
Abstract:
The current Russian security decision-making system represents a particular interest, because Russia today is at a crucial stage of its development. There are a number of factors that are shaping its system: new security dimensions and requirements, traditional and innovative approaches towards security, political interests of various groupings, economic interests of big corporations, politicians' personal ambitions. At the same time the past experience puts a noticeable impact on the current decisionmaking mechanisms. That is why I am going to start with the Soviet period.
Topic:
Communism, Development, and Economics
Political Geography:
Russia, Ukraine, and Soviet Union

24. Conversion at Stepnogorsk: What the Future Holds for Former Bioweapons Facilities

Author:
Sonia Ben Ouagrham and Kathleen M. Vogel
Publication Date:
02-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies
Abstract:
This study examines the ongoing efforts to convert a former biological weapons (BW) facility in Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan. The facility, known in the Soviet period as the Stepnogorsk Scientific and Experimental Production Base (SNOPB), was the USSR's largest mobilization facility dedicated to the production and weaponization of anthrax bacteria. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Kazakh government has demonstrated its commitment to nonproliferation and international security by opening and providing full transparency into the facility. The Kazakh government has issued mandates for a number of restructuring changes and conversion efforts at the facility. Subsequent U.S. and international assistance have played key roles in dis- mantling the facility and redirecting its personnel to peaceful purposes. Yet, the continuing economic and political instability in Kazakhstan maintains concerns regarding the threat of proliferation involving former BW personnel from the facility.
Topic:
Security, Economics, Government, Peace Studies, and Weapons of Mass Destruction
Political Geography:
United States, Kazakhstan, and Soviet Union

25. Russia's Decline and Uncertain Recovery

Author:
Thomas E. Jr. Graham
Publication Date:
05-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:
For much of the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the issue of reform—of transition to free-market democracy—dominated discussions of Russia in Russia itself and in the West. Russian president Boris Yeltsin advocated reform; Western governments declared their support and offered their assistance. This was particularly true of the U.S. government. President Clinton's administration came into office in 1993 determined to assist Russia in its transformation into “a normal, modern state—democratic in its governance, abiding by its own constitution and by its own laws, market-oriented and prosperous in its economic development, at peace with itself and the rest of the world,” as deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott, the chief architect of the U.S. administration's Russia policy, was wont to put it.
Topic:
Economics and Government
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, Europe, Asia, and Soviet Union

26. Divergence and dispersion in the Russian economy

Author:
Per Botolf Maurseth
Publication Date:
12-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
Abstract:
In the Soviet Union, one result of central planning was geographical decentralisation of economic activity to a large set of remote peripheral regions. For Russian post-Soviet regions an important question is whether centripetal market forces may alter the pre-existing industrial location. This paper addresses some aspects of regional economic development in Russia. The Russian economic landscape differs from what is common in market economies. Peripheral regions are generally richer than the average. During the 1990s, differences in gross regional product increased. These developments have also meant less spatial concentration of economic activity. During the last half of the 1990s, economic growth was higher in central regions than in the peripheries. If these trends continue, the Russian economic landscape will alter significantly in the future, with income per capita, total income and population being concentrated in economic central regions.
Topic:
Development, Economics, and Industrial Policy
Political Geography:
Russia and Soviet Union

27. Terrorism and Transnational Organised Crime: the emerging nexus

Author:
Tamara Makarenko
Publication Date:
06-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, St. Andrews University, Scotland
Abstract:
The end of the Cold War and subsequent demise of the Soviet Union ushered in a new international security environment that can no longer be explained by the dominant security paradigms utilised by most Western governments and analysts since World War II. Our understanding of security falling under the rubric of high politics, and focused on maintaining the territorial sovereignty of state actors has been questioned by several ongoing international dynamics. For example, inter-state conflicts have been replaced by rising occurrences of intra-state violence; the state as the central focus of international affairs has given way to a host of non-state actors; and, it has become increasingly evident that the greatest threat to security emanates from the rapidly evolving phenomena of terrorism and transnational organised crime (TOC). In actuality, national, regional and international experience with insecurity over the past decade has confirmed that terrorism and TOC deserve paramount attention precisely because they both span national boundaries, and thus are necessarily multi-dimensional and organised; and, because they directly threaten the stability of states by targeting economic, political and social systems.
Topic:
Security, Crime, Economics, and Terrorism
Political Geography:
Soviet Union

28. Two Reluctant Regionalizers? The European Union and Russia in Europe's North

Author:
Hiski Haukkala
Publication Date:
01-2001
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Finnish Institute of International Affairs
Abstract:
It has become something of a cliché to argue that the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 resulted in dramatic changes in the unfolding of political space in the 1990s. Yet this was especially true in the case of the then European Community (EC) and its relations with the Soviet Union/Russian Federation. During the Cold War, the relations between the EC and the USSR were practically non-existent. The ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev and the period of perestroika and glasnost resulted, however, in a gradual rapprochement between the two parties. The creation of these new ties was formalized in the signing of a Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) between the EC and the USSR, which was, however, in effect signed with an already crumbling Soviet Union as it took place as late as 21 December 1989.
Topic:
Democratization, Development, Economics, and Regional Cooperation
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Asia, and Soviet Union

29. An Anchor in the Mud

Author:
Leon Aron
Publication Date:
09-2001
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Abstract:
For almost two centuries—since Alexander Pushkin's masterpieces laid the foundation—Russian literature has persisted in addressing the core issues and dilemmas of human existence, taking humanity's measure, and explaining Russia and Russians to themselves and the world. Even during the Soviet era, when virtually all of Russia's finest writers and poets were exiled, killed, imprisoned, savagely censored, or forbidden to publish, the tradition lived in underground samizdat, manuscripts smuggled abroad, and in the state-run literary magazines of the “liberal” persuasion, especially during political thaws.
Topic:
Democratization, Economics, and Emerging Markets
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Asia, and Soviet Union

30. Cultural Contradictions of Post-Communism: Why Liberal Reforms Did Not Succeed in Russia

Author:
Nina Khrushcheva
Publication Date:
05-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
One goal of Russia's economic reforms during the last ten years has been to establish a new class of businessmen and owners of private property—people who could form the foundation for a new model post-Soviet citizen. However, the experience of this post-communist economic “revolution” has turned out to be very different from the original expectations. For as people became disillusioned with communism due to its broken promises, the words “democracy” and “reform” quickly became equally as unbearable to large sectors of the Russian public after 1991. Such disillusion was achieved in less than ten years—a record revolutionary burnout that would be the envy of any anti-Bolshevik.
Topic:
Communism, Democratization, Development, Economics, and Government
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Asia, and Soviet Union