Epistemology and ‘evidence’ in development studies: a review of Dollar and Kraay

This paper examines the constraints on state policy autonomy engendered by globalisation. It evaluates the three major competing hypotheses on the decline in the state's inability to bargain with multinational corporations for the purpose of promoting economic development in light of two case studies of state – firm bargaining. The case studies are drawn from the mining sectors in Argentina and Chile in the late 1990s.     

A contested landscape: Monuments,public memory,and post-Soviet identity in Stavropol', Russia

Much recent literature in cultural, political and social geography has considered the relationship between identity, memory, and the urban landscape. This paper interrogates such literature through exploring the complex materialisation of memorialisation in post-Soviet Russia. Using the example of the statue of General Alexei Ermolov in Stavropol', an analysis of the cityscape reveals interethnic tensions over differing interpretations of the life and history of the person upon whom the statue is based. The existence of a rich literature on Ermolov and the Russian colonial experience in the North Caucasus helps to explain this. The symbolic cityscape of Stavropol' plays an important role in interethnic relations in the multi-ethnic city; it is both an arena through which Russian identity is communicated with people and produced and reproduced, and an arena through which Russian citizens compete with each other for authority on historical narratives that operate at and between a number of scales. People's readings of the cityscape can reveal much about power and space in contemporary Russia.     

Social mobility in rural Russia, 1995–2003

Using panel survey data from three Russian villages, this article examines rural social mobility in post-communist Russia. The article finds that contemporary rural social mobility is different from that which existed during the Soviet period. During the Soviet period, rural social mobility was linked to changes in profession and the direction of mobility was primarily upward. In the post-Soviet period, rural mobility is linked to increasing income differentiation and inequality. In the post-communist period, both upward and downward social mobility have occurred. The article examines the characteristics of upwardly and downwardly mobile households. It then analyses the factors that affect mobility through regression analysis of human capital and behavioural models. The article concludes that household labour continues to have the single greatest causal effect on rural mobility.