Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society

This special issue deals with the phenomenon of violence in the post-Soviet space. The central preoccupation is to examine both political and legal discourses and practices of internal and external violence, broadly conceived, in this space. Simultaneously the special issue aspires to situate these discourses and practices in the broader literature on political violence and ethnic and separatist conflict, and to examine these from political, legal, and security studies perspectives. The issue approaches the problem of violence in the post-Soviet space from three perspectives: The international-structural, inter-state, and domestic-political. The contributors focus on structural sources of violence: The relevance of the self-determination principle, the role of democratization, and the relationship between violent behavior inside and outside the state. They also analyze the role of the Russian Federation in generating, perpetuating, and mitigating political violence. Finally, they adopt a bottom-up approach, exploring how non-state actors contribute to political violence.

Special Sections: Russian Foreign Policy Towards the “Near Abroad”and Russia's Annexiation of Crimea II This special section deals with Russia’s post-Maidan foreign policy towards the so-called “near abroad,” or the former Soviet states. This is an important and timely topic, as Russia’s policy perspectives have changed dramatically since 2013/2014, as have those of its neighbors. The Kremlin today is paradoxically following an aggressive “realist” agenda that seeks to clearly delineate its sphere of influence in Europe and Eurasia while simultaneously attempting to promote “soft-power” and a historical-civilizational justification for its recent actions in Ukraine (and elsewhere). The result is an often perplexing amalgam of policy positions that are difficult to disentangle. The contributors to this special issue are all regional specialists based either in Europe or the United States.

Russian Foreign Policy Towards the “Near Abroad” This special section deals with Russia’s post-Maidan foreign policy towards the so-called “near abroad,” or the former Soviet states. This is an important and timely topic, as Russia’s policy perspectives have changed dramatically since 2013/2014, as have those of its neighbors. The Kremlin today is paradoxically following an aggressive “realist” agenda that seeks to clearly delineate its sphere of influence in Europe and Eurasia while simultaneously attempting to promote “soft-power” and a historical-civilizational justification for its recent actions in Ukraine (and elsewhere). The result is an often perplexing amalgam of policy positions that are difficult to disentangle. The contributors to this special issue are all regional specialists based either in Europe or the United States. This issue also features special sections on Multilingualism in Ukraine; and Russia’s Annexation of the Crimea

This special issue provides a forum for discussion of what Belarusian Studies are today and which new approaches and questions are needed to revitalize the field in the regional and international academic arena. The major aim of the issue is to go beyond the narratives of dictatorship and authoritarianism as well as that of a never-ending story of failed Belarusian nationalism—interpretive schemes that are frequently used for understanding Belarus in scholarly literature in Western Europe and Northern America. Bringing together ongoing research based on original empirical material from Belarusian history, politics, and society, this issue combines a discussion of the concept of autonomy/agency with its applicability to trace how individual and collective actors who define themselves as Belarusian—or otherwise— have manifested their agendas in various practices in spite of and in reaction to state pressure. This issue offers new approaches for interpreting Belarusian society as a dynamically changing set of agencies. In doing so, it attempts to overcome a tradition of locating present Belarusian political and social dilemmas in its socialist past.

Featuring a special section on “Identity Clashes: Russian and Ukrainian Debates on Culture, History, and Politics” This issue's special section explores the discursive gaps, tensions, and ruptures between Ukrainian and Russian narratives of national identity. It gives the floor to Russian and Ukrainian authors with a view to enabling analytical comparisons between the dominant narratives in the two countries, including their cultural, historical, and political dimensions. This juxtaposition of Russian and Ukrainian insights is aimed at deepening our understanding of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

Special Sections: Remembering Diversity in East-Central European Cityscapes and Russia’s Annexation of Crimea I Based on up-to-date field material, this issue focuses on the palimpsest-like environments of East-Central European borderland cities. The present shapes and contents of these urban environments derive from combinations of cultural continuities and political ruptures, present-day heritage industries and collective memories about the contentious past, expressive material forms and less conspicuous meaning-making activities of human actors; they evolve from perpetual tensions between the choices of the present and the weight of the past. The contributors address a set of key questions: What is specific about the transnationalization of memory in these urban public spaces? What are the political rationales and ramifications of the different approaches taken to the legacies of perished population groups in different cities? How do these approaches relate to European dimensions of memory and the “European vector” of identity-making of the contemporary urban populations?

The region that once comprised the Soviet Union has been the scene of crises with serious implications for international law. Some of these, like the separatist conflict in Chechnya, date to the time of the dissolution of the USSR. Others, like Russia’s forcible annexation of Crimea and intervention in Ukraine’s Donbas, erupted years later. The seizure of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which took place long before, would trouble Soviet-western relations for the Cold War’s duration and gained new relevance when the Baltic States re-emerged in the 1990s. The fate of Ukraine notwithstanding, the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 complicates future efforts at nuclear non-proliferation. Legal proceedings in connection with events in the post-Soviet space brought before the International Court of Justice and under investment treaties or the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea may be steps toward the resolution of recent crises—or tests of the resiliency of modern international law.

The USSR’s dissolution resulted in the creation of not only fifteen recognized states but also of four non-recognized statelets: Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Transnistria. Their polities comprise networks with state-like elements. Since the early 1990s, the four pseudo-states have been continously dependent on their sponsor countries (Russia, Armenia), and contesting the territorial integrity of their parental nation-states Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova. In 2014, the outburst of Russia-backed separatism in Eastern Ukraine led to the creation of two more para-states, the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR), whose leaders used the experience of older de facto states. In 2020, this growing network of de facto states counted an overall population of more than 4 million people. The essays collected in this volume address such questions as: How do post-Soviet de facto states survive and continue to grow? Is there anything specific about the political ecology of Eastern Europe that provides secessionism with the possibility to launch state-making processes in spite of international sanctions and counteractions of their parental states? How do secessionist movements become embedded in wider networks of separatism in Eastern and Western Europe? What is the impact of secessionism and war on the parental states? The contributors are Jan Claas Behrends, Petra Colmorgen, Bruno Coppieters, Nataliia Kasianenko, Alice Lackner, Mikhail Minakov, and Gwendolyn Sasse.

The philosophy of Paul Ricoeur is rarely viewed through the lens of political philosophy, and yet questions of power, and of how to live together in the  polis , were a constant preoccupation of his writings. This volume brings together a selection of his texts spanning six decades, from 1958 to 2003, which together present Ricoeur’s political project in its coherence and diversity. In Ricoeur’s view, the political is the realm of a tension between “rationality” (the attempt to provide a coherent explanation of the world) and “irrationality,” which manifests itself in force and repression. This “political paradox” lies at the heart of politics, for the claim to explain the world generates its own form of violence: the more one desires the good, the more one is inclined to impose it. Ricoeur warns citizens, the guardians of democracy, against any totalizing system of thought and any dogmatic understanding of history. Power should be divided and controlled, and Ricoeur defends a form of political liberalism in which states are conscious of the limits of their power and respectful of the freedom of their citizens. Ranging from questions of power and repression to those of ethics, identity, and responsibility, these little-known political texts by one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy, politics, and theology and to anyone concerned with the great political questions of our time.

This collection covers the major trends of the media environment of the post-Communist world and their recent development, with special focus on Russia and the post-Soviet space. The term ‘media environment’ covers not just traditional print and electronic media, but new media as well, and ranges from the political to entertainment and various artistic spheres. What role do market forces play in the process of media democratization, and how do state structures regulate, suppress, or use capitalism toward their own gain? What degree of informational pluralism has been achieved in the newly independent republics? What are the prospects for transparency and the participation of civil society in Russian and Eurasian media? To what degree do trends in post-Communist media reflect global trends? Is there a worldwide convergence with regard to both media formats and political messaging? Western observers usually pay their keenest attention to the role of media in Russia and Eurasia during national elections. While this is a valid focus, the present volume, with contributions by Luca Anceschi, Jonathan Becker, Lee B. Becker, Michael Cecire, Marta Dyczok, Nicola Ying Fry, Navbahor Imamova, Azamat Junisbai, Barbara Junisbai, Kornely Kakachia, Maria Lipman, Oleg Manaev, Marintha Miles, Olena Nikolayenko, Sarah Oates, Tamara Pataraia, Elisabeth Schimpfossl, Abdulfattoh Shafiev, Jack Snyder, Tudor Vlad, and Ilya Yablokov, aims at understanding the deeper overall ‘media philosophies’ that characterize post-Soviet media systems and environments, and the type of identity formation that they are promoting.