Urbanisation and the Shifting of Boundaries: Contemporary Transformations in Kinship and Child Circulation amongst the Sakha

In this article, we outline some of the most salient features of kinship transformations amongst the Sakha of northeastern Siberia, including the creation of new social and symbolic boundaries between individual subgroups and members of extended family groups leading to de-traditionalisation of Sakha kinship practices. We specifically focus on the shifts in people’s views on personhood and children. One of the key mechanisms of maintaining kinship-based economies and relations, ‘child circulation’ is losing its previous value in an urban environment. We suggest that these transformations have become more visible as a result of the mass migration of a traditionally rural population to towns.     

Images of Populism and Producerism: Political Cartoons from Serbia’s ‘Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution’*

This article contributes to debates about the break-up of Yugoslavia by focusing on Serbia’s ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’, a large protest wave that occurred in 1988. Unlike most discussions which focus on elite involvement, this article emphasises the wider cultural resonance of anti-bureaucratic populism. More generally, this article shows that populism can be strengthened if it is coupled with producerism, that is, a discourse that divides society into productive and parasitic groups. Around 800 political cartoons from three Serbian newspapers are analysed. The common theme that emerges is the opposition of the blue-collar worker to the parasitic political functionary.     

Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia

The socialist factory, as the ‘incubator’ of the new socialist (wo)man, is a productive entry point for the study of socialist modernization and its contradictions. By outlining some theoretical and methodological insights gathered through field-research in factories in former Yugoslavia, we seek to connect the state of labour history in the Balkans to recent breakthroughs made by labour historians of other socialist countries. The first part of this article sketches some of the specificities of the Yugoslav self-managed factory and its heterogeneous workforce. It presents the ambiguous relationship between workers and the factory and demonstrates the variety of life trajectories for workers in Yugoslav state-socialism (from model communists to alienated workers). The second part engages with the available sources for conducting research inside and outside the factory advocating an approach which combines factory and local archives, print media and oral history.     

Russia as a New Immigration Country: Policy Response and Public Debate

Both the Russian public and its elites were taken by surprise by the fact that Russia has become an immigration country. It has resulted in widespread anti-immigrant sentiments and inconsistency in government actions. Russian immigration politics, as well as immigration politics in liberal democracies of the West, are characterised by a wavering between protectionist and liberal laissez faire approaches. This leads to a mismatch between public rhetoric and legal decisions. However, two features seem to make the Russian situation specific: open borders with most of the countries of the former Soviet Union and omnipresent corruption. Corruption results in a discrepancy between formal (legal) decisions and informal (illegal) practices.     

Black geographies of struggle and pleasure in Nona Faustine’s White Shoes

In Nona Faustine’s photo series of self-portraits, White Shoes, the artist’s body becomes the agent in exposing the instability of racialized historical geography. Faustine revisits New York City’s landmarks to address what is missing or made invisible: a slave ship, a fugitive woman’s rebirth, or African burial grounds. Making herself visible where she is supposed to remain invisible, she highlights the unacknowledged connection between national wealth, nationalism, geography, and black labor. She discloses the topography of her travels as a changeable terrain, where one slips from the national iconic to ambiguous and finally, to the sacred. I suggest that Faustine doesn’t seek to democratize the extant historical maps, but to shift the terms of reading the city’s geography. She lifts the boundaries between the polarized pathways of knowing – the secularized and the sacred, the living and the dead, the verifiable and the missing. This shift is also made possible by the medium of photography and a feminist turn towards pleasures in one’s body. As Faustine comes to terms with the psychic and cultural inheritance of the diaspora, she moves from the collective body of pain towards black women’s pleasure in their own bodies without purging the history of sexual trauma.     

Subnational competitive authoritarianism and power-sharing in Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACT

Incremental democratic decline is evident in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), but measures of democracy conceal an uneven subnational distribution of autocratization. So far there has been limited research on the drivers and constraints to subnational autocratization. This paper aims to contribute to the literature on power-sharing by exploring instances of illiberal politics enacted by parties in government at the subnational level in BiH. Evidence is gathered through semi-structured interviews and analysis of three specific cases of illiberal politics. We find that the political contest in BiH is purposefully contained within ethnic and subnational boundaries and constrained through several layers of institutionalized multilevel and ethnic checks and balances. The main drivers of subnational autocratization are opportunities that arise from the institutional framework established during early democratization and postwar structures that blend executive dominance with economic power and informal party networks, and occasionally from an individual actor’s perceptions of threat. Democratization in BiH will need to address subnational politics and deep-rooted power structures if it is to be successful.     

Russia's Energy Future and Northeast Asia1

Since about 2000, Russia became increasingly interested in a swift expansion of its oil and gas industry to the eastern regions, aiming primarily at the domestic development needs and new markets of Northeast Asia. Eastern Siberia and the Far Eastern areas contain up to 50 percent of Russia's estimated oil reserves. In this context, the Eastern Siberia–Pacific Ocean oil pipeline is attracting attention as a mega-project important not only for Russia, but also for its neighbors. This pipeline will facilitate the development of new oil fields in the remote eastern areas. There are also plans to build oil refineries connected to the pipeline, including the one planned on the Pacific coast. Indeed, Russia needs an access to the neighboring markets not only in the field of oil, but also natural gas and electricity. In this regard, long-term shared interests should drive new energy projects, and governments could greatly facilitate business interaction. Moreover, specific measures dealing with the long-term energy policies are required at the national, bilateral and regional levels, including practical and project specific initiatives tailored to the needs of the economies of Northeast Asia, considering their large markets, geography, technological potential and an interest in building institutions.