Reflections on Environmentalism and the River Diversion Projects

In a companion paper to “Environmentalism in the USSR: The Opposition to the River Diversion Projects,” two geographers survey the current status of water transfer research after cancellation of the European and Siberian diversion projects and offer a different perspective on the debates leading to that cancellation. Implications of a demand-side approach to Centra! Asian water management problems are then assessed in light of (a) contradictory objectives of expanding irrigated hectarage and mitigating environmental deterioration in the Aral basin and (b) the problematic nature of projected water savings and costs involved in their realization. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 052, 124, 720.     

Unity Without Totalitarianism: Tensions Within Normativity

Although he did not invent the term, Jürgen Habermas has popularised “constitutional patriotism” as a form of political unity that avoids excessive nationalism. This paper attempts to examine the link between emotivism and normativity that has otherwise been excluded from Habermas’s notion of constitutional patriotism. Beyond Habermas, political theory as a whole has not yet taken emotivism as a serious component of normativity. Rather than developing it in isolation, this paper attempts to reconcile emotivism with cognitive-normative practices found within rational deliberation. Reconciling the two not only provides a better normative steering component for judging good from bad practices, but also depicts contemporary political practices more accurately. In sum, constitutional patriotism’s normativity must be sourced from a complex integration of emotion and cognition, or put another way, from the interplay between citizens’ moral sentiments and rational judgements.     

Peasant leadership and the Pugachev revolt

This paper examines the leadership of the Pugachev revolt, the vast peasant uprising which took place in Russia between 1773 and 1775. It is also concerned with certain general issues, particularly those concerning the raising and subsequent sustaining of large‐scale peasant movements in ‘pre‐industrial’ societies where peasant organisations beyond village level are lacking. The Pugachev revolt had peculiarities which are of intrinsic interest, but it also provides significant parallels and contrasts to other peasant uprisings (not only in seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century Russia) and generally serves to highlight the problems of the articulation of rural protest in backward societies.