乌克兰事件的世界意义 及其对中国的警示

2014年乌克兰危机和克里米亚回归俄罗斯,对欧洲的意义是确定了欧洲人主导的“新凡尔赛体制”东扩的极限和边界。边界历来都是武力确定的。克里米亚的结局对俄罗斯的意义在于俄罗斯守住了生存底线——底线是俄罗斯未来复兴的基础和前提;对欧洲来说,意味着欧洲东扩已抵极限。从彼得大帝到斯大林,俄罗斯只是在波罗的海东岸地区与欧洲进行过边界拉锯,而在乌克兰,除了在第二次世界大战中的斯大林和冷战时期的戈尔巴乔夫有意收缩和放弃外,俄罗斯在乌克兰这个地方基本没有失过手。从对付拿破仑到希特勒的“胜利”经验中,西方人明白,在陆军可以发挥作用的近地,俄国人往往可以完胜。黑海离俄罗斯太近且陆地相连,陆军可以直接进驻;而西方海权国家在此则鞭长莫及。克里米亚对俄罗斯是生死之地,而对欧洲则是重要利益点,为了它,俄罗斯会用全部资源,而西方则不会。如果清楚俄罗斯在乌克兰归属的历史,也就知道2014年乌克兰事件意味着俄国反击欧洲东扩的历史才真正开始。乌克兰事件的影响是全球性的,其中的一些经验教训对中国而言,是有警示意义的。     

Third time lucky? Establishing diplomatic relations between Russia and South Africa

Diplomatic relations between Russia and South Africa were established in 1992, before South Africa's transition to democracy was completed. This move was perceived as a betrayal by many in both countries and beyond. For many decades the Soviet Union supported the African National Congress in its fight against the apartheid regime. South Africa's National Party government, in its turn, presented the USSR as the main force behind the ‘total onslaught’ – an all-out war purportedly waged against South Africa by international communism. Yet it was with the National Party government that the Russians established diplomatic relations. This article looks into the reasons for this change of heart in Moscow and Pretoria, discusses the political forces behind the decision to establish diplomatic relations, and analyses the process that led to this event and the results of establishing diplomatic relations the way it happened and at the time it happened for both countries.     

Coordination and control in Russia’s foreign policy: travails of Putin’s curators in the near abroad

Abstract

This article seeks to challenge the conception of the Russian state as being centred on Vladimir Putin by looking at the actors implementing Russia’s foreign policy in its near abroad. In particular, it explores the activities of curators (kuratory), a term applied in Russia to describe officials tasked with making things work often bypassing, and sometimes competing with, formal institutions. Following the state transformation framework, the argument put forward in the article is that curation (kuratorstvo), as a practice of coordination and control in Russia’s system of governance, can be seen as a manifestation of fragmentation and internationalisation of Russia’s foreign policy making. The empirical basis for this article is a case study of Russia’s policy towards Abkhazia, which Russia officially recognised as a sovereign state in 2008. This article addresses the involvement of curators in their attempts to exert political influence as an expression of fragmentation as well as emerging institutionalised curation in development assistance as a part of internationalisation.     

Running to stand still: aggressive immobility and the limits of power in Russia

The common conception of Russian politics as an elite game of rent-seeking and autocratic management masks a great deal of ‘mundane’ policymaking, and few areas of social and economic activity have escaped at least some degree of reform in recent years. This article takes a closer look at four such reform attempts – involving higher education, welfare, housing and regional policy – in an effort to discern broad patterns governing how and when the state succeeds or fails. The evidence suggests that both masses and mid-level elites actively defend informality – usually interpreted in the literature as an agent-led response to deinstitutionalization and the breakdown of structure – creating a strong brake on state power. More than a quarter century into the post-Soviet period, this pattern of “aggressive immobility” – the purposeful and concerted defense by citizens of a weakly institutionalized state – has in fact become an entrenched, structural element in Russian politics.     

Election observer effects: A field experiment in the Russian Duma election of 2011

The literature on elections and election monitoring is divided between those who take a skeptical view, suggesting that monitors are often political rather than objective in their judgments, and those who see monitors as a real force for cleaner, more honest elections. Studies that use field experiments to look for the effect of monitors generally support the optimists, indicating that the mere presence of election observers can have powerful effects. This is surprising given the extent of the resources available to incumbents who wish to conduct electoral fraud. We present the results of an experiment in which 768 observers were randomly assigned to polling stations in 21 cities in Russia in the 2011 parliamentary elections. Unlike most previous studies of election observers, our results suggest that observer effects on turnout and vote for the ruling party are small. The results suggest the need to study more carefully the circumstances that shape the impact of observation missions.     

Stability and Change in Putin's Political Image During the 2000 and 2012 Presidential Elections: Putin 1.0 and Putin 2.0?

There has been a lot of research done on “Western” politicians and political systems with regard to political marketing. But what about other countries, especially those that possess a different political standard? This article seeks to address one particular Russian politician: Vladimir Putin. He rose from obscurity to become Russia's second president (after Boris Yeltsin). Two presidential elections form the focus of attention, 2000 Putin, V. (2000). First person. London, UK: Hutchinson. [Google Scholar] and 2012. The aim is to discover the consistencies and breaks in the manufacturing of Putin's political image and reputation. A number of breaks and continuities were discovered in terms of how Putin is marketed. This seems to be a reflection of the changes taking places in Russia's political environment, which then needs to be taken into consideration when political marketing is conducted.     

Political Campaigning Environments in Latvia: From a Global to a Local Perspective

Political campaigning is a global phenomenon in the sense that the methods for achieving political goals are becoming similar all over the globe where elections are being used as a tool for the legitimation of a political elite. This article addresses the question of the extent to which the political campaigning environment in Latvia is influenced by global trends. Globalization in this case is viewed from the perspective of Latvia's geopolitical location between the West and Russia and a comparison of political campaigning practices in Western democracies and authoritarian Russia. What methods of political campaigning are more appropriate in Latvia, those such as used in old democracies or the authoritarian regime? At the same time, there are also considerable local peculiarities in every country that affect the strategic planning and implementation of political campaigns. Therefore, the second research question relates to the main areas that determine the specific framework of the political campaigning environment in Latvia. The results of the research reveal that the influence of both Western and Russian styles of political campaigning are detectable in Latvia, although the international effect is rather limited, because Latvia as a political campaigning environment is dominated by its own unique characteristics. The main aspects that determine the local framework of the political campaigning environment in Latvia are the media system, political parties, and political culture.     

Do Russian research universities have a secret mission? a response to Forrat

This paper challenges the central claim of Natalia Forrat’s article that university support programs under Putin targeted the suppression of anti-regime student mobilization. Empirical evidence, both on the national-policy level and on the level of higher education institutions, suggests that the government introduced support programs in order to establish a research capacity at Russian flagship universities and to develop a more competitive national science system. The low level of students’ political engagement can rather be attributed to the outdated structures of student representation, inherited from the Soviet period.     

The political economy of Russian higher education: why does Putin support research universities?

This article argues that Vladimir Putin's regime launched support programs for the leading Russian universities in 2005 because of a perceived threat of the political mobilization of youth, similar to the one that triggered “color revolutions” in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. The support programs created cleavages in the university community, covered an attack on university autonomy, and made the containment of possible anti-regime student mobilization a part of an implicit agreement between the regime and the universities. The historical coincidence of the “demographic hole,” which caused a shrinkage of the higher education market, and high oil prices, which provided the necessary resources for the regime, made this implicit agreement possible. The article contributes to the research on authoritarianism, youth mobilization, authoritarian backlash after the color revolutions, and the development of research universities in Russia.     

Resurgent authoritarianism: the case of Russia's new NGO legislation

Following the protest demonstrations of the 2011–2012 electoral cycle, tensions between the limited modernization efforts of Medvedev and the resurgent authoritarianism of Putin have become increasingly manifest. These are seen not only in the relationship between society and the state, but also in the “para-constitutional” institutions of the dual state. This article argues that whereas Medvedev created an arena for liberalization within these para-constitutional structures, Putin has firmly rejected these policies, among other things by revising the 1995 law on NGOs amended in 2006. Using the perspective of the dual state, the article argues that with the introduction of the Law on Foreign Agents (2012), the original law draft On Public Control (2014), a key element in Medvedev's modernization program, was delayed and substantially altered. Together, these amendments create precarious conditions for NGOs, pressuring their independence by threats of dissolution and reducing the quality of civil control over state organs.