Three dilemmas of hybrid regime governance: Russia from Putin to Putin

This article investigates how hybrid regimes supply governance by examining a series of dilemmas (involving elections, the mass media, and state institutions) that their rulers face. The authors demonstrate how regime responses to these dilemmas – typically efforts to maintain control while avoiding outright repression and societal backlash – have negative outcomes, including a weakening of formal institutions, proliferation of “substitutions” (e.g., substitutes for institutions), and increasing centralization and personalization of control. Efforts by Russian leaders to disengage society from the sphere of decision-making entail a significant risk of systemic breakdown in unexpected ways. More specifically, given significantly weakened institutions for interest representation and negotiated compromise, policy-making in the Russian system often amounts to the leadership's best guess (ad hoc manual policy adjustments) as to precisely what society will accept and what it will not, with a significant possibility of miscalculation. Three case studies of the policy-making process are presented: the 2005 cash-for-benefits reform, plans for the development of the Khimki Forest, and changes leading up to and following major public protests in 2011–2012.     

Criminalistic identification of PGM-containing products of mining and metallurgical companies

In early 1990 s some organized criminal groups started to develop a new field of illegal business, which involved thefts of intermediary products from mining and metal-producing plants in Russia and in the south of Africa. Since local sulfide copper/nickel ores contain certain concentrations of precious and platinum group metals (PGMs), the intermediary products recovered at different stages of metallurgical transformation of these ores are materials of high commercial value. Illicit transportation and refining of these materials in Western Europe and North America has evolved into a large-scale business, where a lot of unlawful revenues are being laundered. The most important tasks in combating this organized crime are as follows: to establish the facts when some PGM-containing semi-products had been received at certain refineries; to carry out the identification of these semi-products; and to prove that these semi-products had been produced by a certain company. As a rule, it is not difficult to establish the identity of a "clean product". However, when a material is a mix of several semi-products or a mix of some semi-product with masking substances, the identification of individual components becomes an extremely complicated task. The purpose of developing the "complex procedure for establishing the nature and source of origin of precious metal-bearing products of mining and metallurgical operations" was to make possible the identification of complex mixes comprised of various metallurgical semi-products. In the complex procedure that we have developed to characterize dispersed materials, distribution of particles by their elemental composition (the so-called "pseudophase" composition) was used instead of mineralogical composition. To determine the "pseudophase" composition by the method of scanning electron microscopy with X-ray spectral microanalysis (SEM-EDX), a representative sample of material containing not less than 1000 particles was analyzed. All microparticles can be divided into several types. Each type is characterized by an association of chemical elements contained. The first stage includes the study of elemental composition by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry and inductively coupled plasma mass-spectrometry; and the study of phase composition by X-ray diffractometry. The results of each study are compared with data in the Data Base. In case of coincidence with one of the products with respect to all diagnostic features, the type of product and its source of origin are defined accordingly. If the features of the sample under analysis detected by the aforementioned methods do not coincide with any of the product types represented in Data Base, it is necessary to examine elemental composition and morphology of separate particle contained in the substance using SEM-EDX. If some particles characterized by features coinciding with features of particles belonging to any product or products from Data Base are found, this product or a mixture of products is assumed to be present in the composition of the substance under analysis. The assumption that the substance is a mixture can be verified by juxtaposing all previously determined features of the analyzed sample with the features of the pattern mixture (superposition) of the appropriate types of products represented in Data Base. Depending on the results of this verification the corresponding conclusion can be made.     

Do Economic Sanctions Destabilize Country Leaders?

Do economic sanctions destabilize the governments they target? A form of foreign pressure, sanctions are typically meant to alter the policies of other countries. There is much pessimism on whether they ever work. This article shows that economic pressure works in at least one respect: it destabilizes the leaders it targets. I present a theoretical argument that explains why destabilization is a necessary condition for successful coercion. I find evidence that pressure destabilizes in a large panel of cross‐country time‐series data. The destabilization finding indicates that sanctions may be more effective at altering policies than we think. I conclude by noting that greater optimism regarding the effectiveness of sanctions should be balanced by a careful consideration of the policy's real and sizeable costs for those caught in the middle.     

Sanctions and Democracy

How do economic sanctions affect democratization, and should the former be used to promote the latter? Imposing economic pain on large swaths of an already vulnerable population in order to nudge democratic change poses thorny issues. Does it work, in terms of securing democratic outcomes? Even if it did, is this way of achieving change justifiable? We explore the connections between the normative and positive sides of the argument for sanctions in light of theoretical and normative progress in two decades of post-Cold War research on democracy. We argue that some sanctions policies used under specific conditions are more justifiable, but there are other sanctions policies that are less justifiable.