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This ambitious ten-volume series develops a comprehensive analysis of the evolving world role of the post-Soviet successor states. Each volume considers a different factor influencing the relationship between internal politics and international relations in Russia and in the western and southern tiers of newly independent states. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of Marxism-Leninism as a source of political legitimacy have prompted a search for fresh principles of political organization that will shape the nature of political culture in all the post-Soviet countries. This volume analyzes the nature of the emerging political cultures and their impact on the processes of democratization in these new states.

Politics in Europe introduces students to the power of the EU and seven political systems—the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Russia, and Poland—while addressing key social and political issues including globalization, terrorism, immigration, gender, and religion. Packed with robust country descriptions from regional specialists, the Eighth Edition encourages critical thinking and meaningful cross-national comparisons.

Ukraine and Russia are today at opposite points of the political spectrum: Despite 300 years of contact with Russian authoritarian politics, Ukraine's post-independence period has been characterised by pluralism. To explain why and how Ukraine's and Russia's paths diverged, this monograph investigates the century-long and Soviet origins of regionalism in Ukraine, which the author argues are at the foundation of the modern Ukrainian institutional system. Drawing on unused archival material, the book re-examines the relationship between Moscow, Kyiv, and the Ukrainian regions in the period from spring 1917 to summer 1994 to demonstrate how interlinked political and economic incentives and constraints determined the opportunities and institutional interests of both the Ukrainian leadership and those of the Ukrainian regions, and how this institutional framework affected in turn the dynamic of the relationship between the central leadership in Moscow, the Ukrainian leadership, and the regions. The result - weak central authority and pronounced regionalism - was Ukraine's Soviet legacy, and the established power of regional clans made (post-Soviet) Ukrainian politics resistant to Russian?style authoritarianism, even when the Soviet centralised party-state system collapsed. This innovative and wide-ranging approach to the history of economic management highlights the importance of considering long-term historical trends for understanding both the complicated nature of Soviet institutions and their varied and contested legacies across post-Soviet space.

Modern liberal democracy and authoritarian collectivism have known diverse political regimes; autocratic, oligarchic or democratic, they each consist of a mixed, partly oligarchic regime in which plebeian politics are subordinated. With authoritarian collectivism's defeat, a return to modernity has produced one more hybrid configuration.An in-depth investigation of political modernity and how it is differentiated from other forms of society, this book researches its origins and trajectory as a specific dimension of modern civilisation – articulating a renewed critical theory through an analysis of rights and law, politics, state and autonomy, social reproduction, crisis and political change.Examining these diverse aspects, Political Modernity and Social Theory proposes an encompassing and far-reaching approach spanning past and present – stressing radical plebeian democracy and maintaining a strong opening to the future and to possible alternatives to modernity.The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

The Soviet Intelligentsia (1973) is a valuable study of the composition and structure of the Soviet intelligentsia during the 1960s. It focuses in particular on the position of social scientists and the relationship between the intelligentsia and the Communist party. The book contains much original material drawn from Soviet newspapers, books and periodicals, and from the personal experiences of the author in the Soviet Union. It discusses the problem of defining the intelligentsia, their social spread, recruitment and training, as well as Soviet intellectual culture and lifestyles, the social and political roles of the intelligentsia and the likely future of this distinctive group in the Soviet system.

This book introduces the readers to the dynamics of various kinds of social movements. It examines how social movements have become an instrument of social change including assertion of identity and protest against marginalisation. This book describes three major domains – conceptual, experiential, and the impact of globalisation on social movements. The volume begins by locating social movements within broad and contemporary social processes and explores the intrinsic and complex patterns of dynamics among state, market, and social movements from a critical sociological perspective. It explains the meaning, basic features, origins and types, leadership and ideology, and perspectives of social movements and probes into major experiences of eight social movements in India, namely, peasant and farmers, tribal, Naxalite and Maoist, Dalit, working class, women, ethnic, and environmental movements. This book also analyses the role of information technology, media, and civil society in the spread and continuation of such movements. The experiences of queer, new religious, anti-systemic, and anti-displacement movements would also help readers understand how globalisation has offered new avenues of protest to diverse sections of the population. Lessons of anti-globalisation movements across the world provide a futuristic perspective in assessing the strength of social movements in a global society.This book will be useful to the students, researchers, and faculty working in the field of political science, sociology, gender studies, and post-colonial contemporary Indian politics in particular. It will also be an invaluable and interesting reading for those interested in South Asian studies.

Reflections on Stalinism distills decades of historical thought and research, bringing together twelve senior scholars of Soviet history who began their careers during the Cold War to examine their views of Stalinism. They present insights into the role of personality in statecraft, the social underpinnings of dictatorship and state terrorism, historians'attachments to their subjects, historical causality, the applicability of Marxist categories to Soviet history, the relationship of Soviet history to post-Soviet Russia, and more. Essays address the transformation of a peasant country into a superpower and the causes and scale of domestic bloodshed. Reflections on Stalinism ultimately tackles an age-old question: Do powerful people make history or are they the product of it?

When the Soviet Union's communist empire collapsed in 1989, a mood of euphoria took hold in the West and in Eastern Europe. The West had won the ultimate victory--it had driven a silver stake through the heart of Communism. Its next planned step was to help the nations of Eastern Europe to reconstruct themselves as democratic, free-market states, and full partners in the First World Order. But that, as Janine Wedel reveals in this gripping volume, was before Western governments set their poorly conceived programs in motion. Collision and Collusion tells the bizarre and sometimes scandalous story of Western governments'attempts to aid the former Soviet block. He shows how by mid-decade, Western aid policies had often backfired, effectively discouraging market reforms and exasperating electorates who, remarkably, had voted back in the previously despised Communists. Collision and Collusion is the first book to explain where the Western dollars intended to aid Eastern Europe went, and why they did so little to help. Taking a hard look at the bureaucrats, politicians, and consultants who worked to set up Western economic and political systems in Eastern Europe, the book details the extraordinary costs of institutional ignorance, cultural misunderstanding, and unrealistic expectations.

An examination of Russia's philosophical heritage. It extends from the Slavophiles to the philosophers of the Silver Age, from emigre religious thinkers to Losev and Bakhtin and assesses the meaning for Russian culture as a whole.

This Research Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the latest knowledge on authoritarian regimes. Combining quantitative research and in-depth case studies, it not only provides novel insights into past and current dictatorships but also forecasts potential new developments in authoritarian politics.Through detailed analyses of diverse authoritarian regimes, including those in China, Egypt, North Korea, Syria, Turkmenistan, and Uganda, this Research Handbook examines authoritarian performance, credibility, and legitimacy. Arguing that the key to understanding authoritarian politics is the politics of survival, chapters provide detailed analysis of central actors, institutions, and strategies to illustrate the impact of efforts to retain power on wider political outcomes. With sections dedicated to exploring common issues for authoritarianism researchers and showcasing cutting-edge developments in the field, contributors provide insight into important questions on how authoritarian regimes continue to survive today.Presenting detailed explorations of classic and contemporary trends in authoritarianism, this Research Handbook will be an essential resource for students and scholars of authoritarianism, international relations, and comparative politics. It will also be an invaluable guide for policymakers seeking to understand modern authoritarianism.

One of the largest and most feared military forces in the world, the Red Army was a key player in advancing the cause of Soviet socialism. Rising out of revolutionary-era citizen militias, it aspired to the greatness needed to confront its Cold War adversaries but was woefully unprepared to change with the times.In this first comprehensive study of the Soviet officer corps, Roger Reese traces the history of the Red Army from Civil War triumph through near-decimation in World War II and demoralizing quagmire in Afghanistan to the close scrutiny it came under during Gorbachev's reform era. Reese takes readers inside the Red Army to reconstruct the social and institutional dynamics that shaped its leadership and effectiveness over seventy-three years. He depicts the lives of these officers by revealing their class origins, life experiences, party loyalty, and attitudes toward professionalism. He tells how these men were shaped by Russian culture and Soviet politics—and how the Communist Party dominated every aspect of their careers but never allowed them the autonomy they needed to cultivate a high level of military effectiveness.Despite its struggle to develop and maintain professionalism, the officer corps was often hampered by factors inextricably intertwined with the Soviet state: Marxist theory, revolutionary ideology, friction between party and non-party members, and the influence of the army's political administration organs. Reese shows that by rejecting the Western bourgeois model of military professionalism the state greatly limited its officer corps'ability to develop a more effective military. While a sense of group identity emerged among officers after World War II, it quickly lost relevance in the face of postwar challenges, especially the war in Afghanistan, which underscored fatal flaws in command leadership.Red Commanders offers new insight into the workings of a military giant and also restores Leon Trotsky to his rightful place in Soviet military history by featuring his ideas on building a new army from the ground up. It is an important look behind the scenes at a military establishment that continues to face leadership challenges in Russia today.

Using a model of'fragmented authoritarianism,'this volume sharpens our view of the inner workings of the Chinese bureaucracy. The contributors'interviews with politically well-placed bureaucrats and scholars, along with documentary and field research, illuminate the bargaining and maneuvering among officials on the national, provincial, and local levels.CONTRIBUTORS:Nina P. HalpernCarol Lee HamrinDavid M. LamptonKenneth G. LieberthalMelanie ManionBarry NaughtonLynne PaineJonathan D. PollackSusan L. ShirkPaul E. SchroederAndrew G. WalderDavid Zweig This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

‘The revolutions of 1989'remains the standard term used to describe the onset of post-communist transformations more than thirty years ago. Zenonas Norkus proposes a completely new perspective, theorising them as the next wave of modern social restorations, starting with the post-Napoleonic restorations in 1815. A comparison of the 1789 French and 1917 Russian revolutions was seminal for the rise of comparative historical and sociological research on modern revolutions. The book extends and supplements the sociology of modern revolutions by the first systematic outline of the sociology of modern social restorations grounded in a comparison of post-Napoleonic and post-communist restorations.

Class War or Race War is more than an anti-thesis of the master narrative regarding the Soviet state antisemitism. Kende not only refutes the originally anti-Communist myth of the systemic nature of (state) socialism, but tries to re-, and deconstruct, the origins of this myth.With intensive use of historical documents, memoirs and the related historiography, the book attempts to make historical sense from the myth it intends to refute. Kende goes beyond the contemporary perceptions of the “Jewish question” and antisemitism, and with close reading of original documents, reconstructs the real frontlines of the Soviet society of the 1940s, which were not constructed along identity-political lines. The book reinvests the long-forgotten understanding of social classes in an allegedly classless and monolithic society. The spontaneous formations of the actual frontlines in the hinterland, or on the actual fronts (battlefields, in the Red Army) lacked the participants'class consciousness, thus its occurrences in the form of conflict producing historical records were recorded as acts of antisemitism. As the book advocates, Jews could have been found on both sides of the inner frontlines of Soviet society during and right after WWII.An insightful read for scholars of Soviet history that presents a bold and challenging interpretation of the regime and its flaws—both perceived and real.

Nâzım Hikmet (1902-1963) is best known as a poet and communist whose daring flight by motorboat from Turkey to the Eastern Bloc captured international headlines in 1951. One of the most important poets to have written in the Turkish language, Nâzım Hikmet's dramatic life story is fascinating in its own right, but also intersects with the story of the broader twentieth century. James H. Meyer situates Nâzım Hikmet within the broader context of Turkish communist'border-crossers', individuals whose lives would go on to be shaped significantly by their ability, inability, or need to traverse the frontier. Born at the turn of the twentieth century and coming of age in the early 1920s, the women and men from Nâzım Hikmet's generation were the last of the Ottomans. Children of empire, they had grown up in an era of porous frontiers, but by the time they reached their third decade, these borders had begun to close. Drawing upon an enormous amount of previously untapped archival materials and personal papers from Moscow, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC, Meyer has written a biography of Nâzım Hikmet unlike any other. A book of world history wrapped inside a life story, Red Star over the Black Sea shows how changing attitudes toward borders and the people who cross them impacted a late imperial generation all the way up to the final years of the Cold War.

This collection of studies investigates the political economy of international relations between the Soviet bloc (the “East”) and the developing world (the “South”), spanning the entire post-Stalin era while focusing on the 1970s and 1980s. The works examine East-South relations from the standpoints of international trade patterns, financial transfers, military relations including their economic angle, interactions within the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and the international legal framework for trade embedded in the “socialist offensive in international law.” The chapters provide extensive bibliographies making this volume a handbook of great interest not only to researchers, but also to university students and the general public.

Focusing on the distinct identities and diverse lived experiences of women in a wide range of countries and cultures, this book provides a comprehensive overview of women in local, regional, and national politics around the world.Woman and Politics takes on the historical challenges women have and continue to face, and the victories they have achieved, in political cultures and structures around the world. The introduction walks readers through the key issues, pressing concerns, and foremost questions that researchers confront in their studies of women in various political roles across the globe. The remainder of the book, divided into eight chapters, covers such topics as women's suffrage, the status of women in politics today, women as national leaders, barriers to women's political representation, and others. Leading experts and emerging scholars come together in this volume to ask and provide answers to the question of why gender parity is so important in politics. They answer that only women, who as a group have a distinct identity and lived experiences that differ from men's collective identities and interests, can accurately represent themselves both at home and on the world stage.

The Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy brings together scholars who are working on essential and field-shaping topics in this burgeoning area. Historical Political Economy (HPE) is the study of how political and economic actors and institutions have interacted over time. It differs from much of economic history in that it focuses on the causes and consequences of politics. It departs from much of conventional political economy in that its context is strictly historical, even if/when it has implications for contemporary political economy. It also departs from much of history in its use of social-scientific theory and methods. Thus, while HPE involves elements of the traditional fields of economics, political economy, and history, it is separate from-and integrative of-them. The Handbook includes contributions from leading scholars in political science, economics, sociology, and history. The first section summarizes the state of the field and provides an overview of the data and techniques typically used by HPE scholars. Subsequent chapters survey major HPE research areas in political economy, political science, and economics, as well as the long-run economic, political, and social consequences of historical political economy. Various chapters in the Handbook will be of interest to economists, political scientists, sociologists, historians, legal scholars, and public policy scholars who study political-economy issues and topics from a historical perspective. There are currently not many forums for scholars in these fields to interact and share ideas. The Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy ameliorates this issue, cutting across disciplinary lines and reducing the barriers to interdisciplinary discussions.

Moscow's Heavy Shadow tells the story of the collapse of the USSR from the perspective of the many millions of Soviet citizens who experienced it as a period of abjection and violence. Mikhail Gorbachev and the leaders of the USSR saw the years of reform preceding the collapse as opportunities for rebuilding (perestroika), rejuvenation, and openness (glasnost). For those in provincial cities across the Soviet Union, however, these reforms led to rapid change, economic collapse, and violence.Focusing on Dushanbe, Tajikistan, Isaac McKean Scarborough describes how this city experienced skyrocketing unemployment, a depleted budget, and streets filled with angry young men unable to support their families. Tajikistan was left without financial or military resources, unable and unprepared to stand against the wave of populist politicians of all stripes who took advantage of the economic collapse and social discontent to try to gain power. By May 1992, political conflict became violent and bloody and engulfed the whole of Tajikistan in war. Moscow's Heavy Shadow tells the story of how this war came to be, and how it was grounded in the reform and collapse of the Soviet economy that came before.

The long history of China's relationship between stability, diversity, and prosperity, and how its current leadership threatens this delicate balance “Riveting.”—Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2023 Chinese society has been shaped by the interplay of the EAST—exams, autocracy, stability, and technology—from ancient times through the present. Beginning with the Sui dynasty's introduction of the civil service exam, known as Keju, in 587 CE—and continuing through the personnel management system used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—Chinese autocracies have developed exceptional tools for homogenizing ideas, norms, and practices. But this uniformity came with a huge downside: stifled creativity. Yasheng Huang shows how China transitioned from dynamism to extreme stagnation after the Keju was instituted. China's most prosperous periods, such as during the Tang dynasty (618–907) and under the reformist CCP, occurred when its emphasis on scale (the size of bureaucracy) was balanced with scope (diversity of ideas). Considering China's remarkable success over the past half-century, Huang sees signs of danger in the political and economic reversals under Xi Jinping. The CCP has again vaulted conformity above new ideas, reverting to the Keju model that eventually led to technological decline. It is a lesson from China's own history, Huang argues, that Chinese leaders would be wise to take seriously.

Focusing on the conflict and coordination between social development and political order in social governance, this book investigates the causes, evolution, and manifestations of such tensions in contemporary China, combining both qualitative and quantitative analysis.It has always been a complicated issue for social governance in China to maintain a balanced and benign interaction between social development and political order: Strong leadership from the state can foster robust social development, which can itself pose challenges to the existing political order. To approach this paradox, this book first discusses the entanglement of law and politics in China's social governance, embodied by state legitimacy of the state and its governance. It then examines institutional changes through analyzing the relationship between market mechanisms and planned systems, as well as the petitioning system, a unique political setup in China. By examining arbitrariness in the practice of Mao Zedong's theory on two types of contradictions, the author uncovers the characteristics and political basis of China's approach to resolving social conflict.This title is essential reading for scholars and students studying sociology and political science, especially those interested in social governance in China and contemporary Chinese politics.Shizheng Feng is Professor and Dean of the School of Sociology and Population Studies at Renmin University of China. His research areas include political sociology, historical sociology, social governance and state-making, and political order in China's social transformation.

The Soviet Union was one of the most secretive states that ever existed. Defended by a complex apparatus of rules and checks administered by the secret police, the Soviet state had seemingly unprecedented capabilities based on its near monopoly of productive capital, monolithic authority, and secretive decision making. But behind the scenes, Soviet secrecy was double-edged: it raised transaction costs, incentivized indecision, compromised the effectiveness of government officials, eroded citizens'trust in institutions and in each other, and led to a secretive society and an uninformed elite. The result is what this book calls the secrecy/capacity tradeoff: a bargain in which the Soviet state accepted the reduction of state capacity as the cost of ensuring its own survival. This book is the first comprehensive, analytical, multi-faceted history of Soviet secrecy in the English language. Harrison combines quantitative and qualitative evidence to evaluate the impact of secrecy on Soviet state capacity from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Based on multiple years of research in once-secret Soviet-era archives, this book addresses two gaps in history and social science: one the core role of secrecy in building and stabilizing the communist states of the twentieth century; the other the corrosive effects of secrecy on the capabilities of authoritarian states.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

This volume presents state-of-the-art creative scholarship in political science and area studies with an emphasis on Russia. The contributors, all well-known in their specialties, share the conviction that advancement in the social sciences can only be achieved through plural methodological approaches and interaction with various disciplines. Their work in this collection provides critical analyses of key issues in Russian and post-Soviet studies. It explores the most fruitful ways of studying Russia with particular emphasis on the federal system, politics in the era of Putin, challenges of Russian foreign policy, and Russian attitudes toward democracy. The vagaries of democracy are also explored in articles on Georgia and Turkey. Additionally, this book examines the philosophy of technology with an emphasis on critical theory, eco-domination, and engineering ethics.

The Post-Communist World in the Twenty-First Century presents studies by senior scholars and practitioners that are highly relevant to contemporary political challenges. The democratic vision that accompanied the collapse of communist regimes in the Soviet Union and East Central Europe has been replaced by a range of authoritarian, semi-authoritarian and democratic regimes, and growing division between Western and Russian influence. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has led to renewed tensions and international crisis. China, which presents major challenges to the US, Europe, and the global order, has emerged as a critical actor in the international conflict. The need to understand the internal dynamics and international behavior of communist and authoritarian regimes is more urgent at this time. The expertise provided by the volume's contributors is especially timely, offering new insights into the past and contemporary politics of these states, the agendas driving their behavior, regimes'domestic strengths and weaknesses, and the role of leaders'differing perceptions in exacerbating international conflict. Practitioners demonstrate how such knowledge can inform effective policy and ameliorative efforts.

How and why cities have become the predominant sites for revolutionary upheavals in the contemporary worldExamining the changing character of revolution around the world, The Revolutionary City focuses on the impact that the concentration of people, power, and wealth in cities exercises on revolutionary processes and outcomes. Once predominantly an urban and armed affair, revolutions in the twentieth century migrated to the countryside, as revolutionaries searched for safety from government repression and discovered the peasantry as a revolutionary force. But at the end of the twentieth century, as urban centers grew, revolution returned to the city—accompanied by a new urban civic repertoire espousing the containment of predatory government and relying on visibility and the power of numbers rather than arms.Using original data on revolutionary episodes since 1900, public opinion surveys, and engaging examples from around the world, Mark Beissinger explores the causes and consequences of the urbanization of revolution in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beissinger examines the compact nature of urban revolutions, as well as their rampant information problems and heightened uncertainty. He investigates the struggle for control over public space, why revolutionary contention has grown more pacified over time, and how revolutions involving the rapid assembly of hundreds of thousands in central urban spaces lead to diverse, ad hoc coalitions that have difficulty producing substantive change.The Revolutionary City provides a new understanding of how revolutions happen and what they might look like in the future.

Includes the contribution of James A. Robinson, 2024 Nobel Laureate in EconomicsOver the past 50 years, scholars across the social sciences have employed critical juncture analysis to understand how social orders are created, become entrenched, and change. In this book, leading scholars from several disciplines offer the first coordinated effort to define this field of research, assess its theoretical and methodological foundations, and use a critical assessment of current practices as a basis for guiding its future. Contributors include stars in this field who have written some of the classic works on critical junctures, as well as the rising stars of the next generation who will continue to shape historical comparative analysis for years to come. Critical Junctures and Historical Legacies will be an indispensable resource for social science research methods scholars and students.

John F. Kennedy remains a compelling figure almost sixty years after his tragic assassination. Kennedy's voice—with all of its characteristic eloquence—as well as the engaging complexity of the man himself, are brought to life in John F. Kennedy's 1957 Algeria Speech. This book deals with one of Kennedy's most important as a U.S. Senator—but least recognized—foreign policy speeches calling for Algerian independence after more than a century of French colonial rule. The reader will experience the debate surrounding Kennedy's speech of July 2, 1957, particularly the resistance it encountered from the Eisenhower administration, French officials, and French citizens, senior members of America's foreign policy community such as Dean Acheson and Adlai Stevenson, and editorial criticism in some of the most distinguished journals in the United States and France. The author offers new insights into Kennedy's reasons for giving this speech, as well as his extensive preparation spanning fifteen months. Cleva uses in depth scholarship to analyze several years of classified U.S. Government documents dealing with the Algerian crisis in order to provide this comprehensive study of Kennedy's Senate speech, how it shaped Kennedy's own administration, as well its significance to American foreign policy.

The rise of authoritarian populism and declining popular confidence in democratic institutions has, of late, prompted many declarations that democracy is in crisis. Nevertheless, democracy still enjoys its supremacy in contemporary political discourse, with limited meaningful alternatives. Few of today's authoritarian leaders publicly denounce democracy; instead, they are more inclined to present their regimes as democracies. Furthermore, public opinion surveys show that ordinary citizens still widely and deeply appreciate democracy, even in societies with limited practice of democracy. Democracy is still the'only game'in contemporary political discourse. Given the popularity of democracy, the hotly debated and discussed crisis of democracy is puzzling. If most people love democracy and politicians have to live with democracy (whether they like it or not), how can democracy be in trouble? More specifically, if people love democracy, shouldn't they despise authoritarian leaders and regimes, or even join the advocates of democracy to rebel against authoritarianism? To address these questions, Understandings of Democracy looks at both the practices of political elites and key dynamics that drive mass attitudes and behaviors. Jie Lu and Yun-han Chu argue that mass attitudes and behaviors are greatly affected by how people understand democracy. More specifically, they make the following arguments: people hold distinct understandings of democracy; popular conceptions of democracy are significantly shaped by surrounding socioeconomic and political contexts; such varying conceptions generate different baselines for people to assess democratic practices and to establish their views of democracy; and such distinct conceptions also drive political participation in different ways. Overall, popular understandings of democracy shape how citizens respond to authoritarian or populist practices and offer significant explanatory power for understanding why democracy is in trouble in today's world, even when most people profess to love democracy. Using large-scale comparative surveys and survey experiments from seventy-two societies and a national survey in the United States, Understandings of Democracy captures how people respond when presented with the tradeoffs between the intrinsic and instrumental values of democracy, as well as the attitudinal and behavioral implications of such responses.

'Close to a miracle... The Shortest History of the Soviet Union is an immensely readable overview of the entire history of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991, full of anecdotes and lively detail, but also meeting the highest academic standards'Slavoj ŽižekThe U.S.S.R. A nation that arrived in the world accidentally, and departed unexpectedly. Over a century after the Russian Revolution, the tumultuous history of the Soviet Union continues to fascinate us and influence global politics. From revolution and Lenin to Stalin's Terror, from World War II to glasnost, this is an authoritative distillation of 75 years of communist rule, and the disintegration of an empire.Fitzpatrick charts the fate of countries often left out of Soviet histories, gives vivid portraits of key figures, and traces the aftermath of the regime's sudden collapse. She explores the rise of the oligarchs, the rebirth of the Church and the enigmatic figure of Vladimir Putin: a Soviet creation but no Soviet nostalgic. Lastly, she considers the future of Communism. Who still worships Marx and Lenin? What lessons has today's superpower, China, learned from yesterday's Soviet failure?

This book examines the planned disaggregation of the global structures of the Cold War. In the final years of a decades-long era of bipolarity, the United States and the Soviet Union co managed a continental transformation that erased Europe's Iron Curtain.

eBook: Representative Government in Modern Europe, 5e

This book presents an unusual view on one of the most influential periods in world economic history: the Early Globalization. By this term, the notion that a process of genuine globalization took place in the Early Modern Era is defended. The authors propose that the canonical globalization—that of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—was preceded by a century-long increasing economic integration between continents that were non-existent before 1492. The economic aspects of the Early Globalization, like market integration, price co-movements and international silver circulation, were very important. Notwithstanding, other dimensions of human life, which were affected by unprecedented intercontinental contacts, including free and forced migrations, changes in tastes and consumption, etc. The Fruits of Globalisation deals with some of the most important issues among the former and the latter. The book combines approaches from different disciplines, including quantitative and non-quantitative economic history, econometrics, international trade and demography. Overall, the vision of the Early Globalisation offered in this book is less pessimistic than in mainstream literature on the period.

The essays in this book examine the arguments and rhetoric used by the United States and the USSR following two catastrophes that impacted both countries, as blame is cast and consequences are debated. In this environment, it was perhaps inevitable that conspiracy theories would arise, especially about the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 over the Sea of Japan. Those theories are examined, resulting in at least one method for addressing conspiracy arguments. In the case of Chernobyl, the disaster ruptured the “social compact” between the Soviet government and the people; efforts to overcome the resulting disillusionment quickly became the focus of state efforts.