Catherine Owen

“Consentful contention” in a corporate state: human rights activists and public monitoring commissions in Russia

This article explores contentious politics within institutions that are neither state bodies nor “civil society” organisations in contemporary Russia. It shows that human rights activists join Public Monitoring Commissions, created by the state to oversee conditions in prisons, to prevent these bodies from “white-washing” the Federal Penitentiary Service and in some cases have effected small but noteworthy improvements inside the prisons under their jurisdiction. Their contentious claims are grounded in the government’s own legislation and made from a platform that is formally endorsed by the state and are therefore more difficult for the authorities to ignore.

Theorizing Chinese Citizenship

The continuous development of the BRICS relationship strengthened the argument for the reform of global governance institutions. In Chapter 6 Stuenkel studies how that claim evolved to the institutionalisation of the group’s relationship through the creation of the New Development Bank and the Contingency Reserve Agreement at the 2014 BRICS meeting in Fortaleza. Currently, other forms of institutionalised cooperation are being discussed in many dimensions, including aid and foreign direct investment. Nevertheless, despite this institutional development, the BRICS’ relationship with Western institutions remains important. After the analysis of the BRICS’ historical progression, Chapter 7 relates the evolution of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) concept to the BRICS’ scepticism vis-à-vis R2P, discussing in this sense the dichotomy between ‘a pro-interventionist Global North and a pro-sovereignty Global South’ (p. 129). The fact is that ‘the BRICS were, in general, quite suspicious of those who argued for a doctrine of “contingent sovereignty”’ (p. 128), mainly because of a different position concerning how interventions should be done. To prove his point, the author analyses all the major decisions and resolutions that the UN Security Council issued until 2011 in relation to both the BRICS and R2P. Special attention is paid to resolution 1973 on Libya and on the BRICS’ positions towards a resolution on the conflict in Syria. The last chapter focuses on the Crimean Crisis and on how Brazil, India, China and South Africa reacted to it. Departing from Schweller and Pu’s cyclical phases of systemic change, Stuenkel argues that the BRICS do not have the interest to change a system that they ultimately see as beneficial nor have the intellectual basis to create an alternative global order. Their goal is purely to challenge the establishment. This is a useful chapter to question the established rhetoric that tends to demonise the BRICS’ existence. Although the internal politics in the BRICS states has drastically changed since 2008, the institutions they have created are still important and feed their current cooperation. According to Stuenkel, the BRICS example overrules some realist arguments by showing that institutions can adapt themselves to other needs and are often the origin of new forms of cooperation. From the world of finance and a successful demand for reform of the IMF, the BRICS moved to education, science and defence. Overall this is a book that focuses on the BRICS’ internal dynamics, analysing the several moments that led to the construction of the bloc. It is ‘a critical “historical biography” of the BRICS concept’ (p. ix), making it suitable for a wider audience and satisfying both the needs of experienced researchers and readers in general. It is a book that falls under the wider research about the role of emerging powers in international relations and the consequent and irreversible transition from a unipolar to a multipolar global order.

Populist Authoritarianism. Chinese Political Culture and Regime Sustainability

community perceives the country, leading to the emergence of a bond between members of the German and Russian communities of Taldykorgan, both of whom are disadvantaged by the emergent language policies. However, some locals note the positive minority policies of President Nursultan Nazarbayev that have allowed minority communities to retain their native languages (pp. 125–26). To summarise, Sanders’ work is a significant contribution to the literature on diaspora, migration and minority studies. Her study explores why a minority community chooses to remain, when presented with the opportunity to permanently settle in the country of their ancestors. This is in addition to elaborating on how, in modern-day Kazakhstan, the German community’s relations with ethnic Kazakhs have generally been amicable, if occasionally fraught, especially in light of state language policies. These positive relations contrast with those of Germans to ethnic Russians. For some Kazakhstani Germans, the horrors inflicted on their families during Soviet rule has caused irreparable damage to how they view Russians, while for others Soviet nostalgia and the help they received from Russians brings them closer to Taldykorgan’s Russian community. Overall, Sanders highlights the fluidity with which an ethnic German identity is promoted, concealed or discarded by Kazakhstani Germans, depending on their past lived experiences or present daily lives.

Civil Society in Putin's Russia

After a peak in scholarly interest in Russian civil society in the early to mid-2000s, studies of this subject have dwindled in recent years as researchers switched their attention to the kind of p...

The History of Liberalism in Russia

recognise that their stance was candid given the nature of these regimes characterised by long-lasting authoritarian practices of power, as well as weak civil societies and institutions. The last part introduces the twofold theoretical challenge faced by Central Asia. The area is traditionally seen as dominated by informal networks and tribal allegiances. However, after the collapse of the USSR, the countries have followed diverging paths, from civil war and ethnic conflicts in Tajikistan to highly stable presidential regimes in Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, and coloured revolutions turning into authoritarian regimes, like in Kyrgyzstan with the Tulip Revolution. As convincingly argued by the contributors, the hybrid regimes theory is of no help to account for change or diversity in the region since it merely focuses on formal relations and political systems, without considering either how the state functions of redistribution and access to resources are carried out, or how administrative structures cope with clientele and network relations. The progressive neopatrimonialisation of the former bureaucratic Soviet state apparatus is described as a general evolution in the region, dating back to the collapse of the USSR. Nevertheless, in some countries like Kazakhstan, the state apparatus is still able to carry out administrative reform and implement development policies—whereas, in poorer countries such as Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan, a deeper patrimonialisation of the state has led to the weakening of public concerns; now private interests prevail. Devoted to Kazakhstan, Chapter 12 provides useful insight into the articulation between neopatrimonialism and development. The authors analyse the ‘dilemma of inclusion’ faced by President Nazarbaev. On the one hand, the leader uses patrimonialism as a way to enlarge his support from appointed political and business counter-elites, who have been newly included in power circles. On the other hand, Nazarbaev’s development project for the country entails campaigns against the very same corruption networks that stabilise his control over the country. As for Kyrgyzstan, it offers an unprecedented example in Central Asia of a move from democratisation to authoritarianism. Focusing on the Tulip Revolution and its aftermaths, Alexander Wolters analyses the role of public opinion in this regime change and in decision making. This original view, supported by references to Luhmann’s system theory, dismisses the common analyses referring to the key role of informality, traditions and cultural ethnic networks in the region. However, as he acknowledges, when repression and authoritarian trends or ethnic conflicts occur, the system of power becomes a black box ‘of unpredictable, informal and repressive moves’ (p. 232). To conclude, this excellent volume is a major contribution to post-Soviet studies: it provides an exciting debate with diverse and dissenting views on the enigma of the political trajectories in the area. Still, the question left for the reader is that of the relevance of transition theory, which loses much of its heuristical power in the endeavour to capture the complex political landscape in the post-Soviet region.

Liberals under Autocracy. Modernization and Civil Society in Russia, 1866–1904

distributed to others. Harris focuses on a number of ways that individuals responded to these realities, including squatting: an illegal development that illustrated the extent to which individuals felt they were entitled to housing—and Party and security organs’ reluctance to risk conflict with the public. Chapter 6 looks at the provision of furniture within apartments. While experts saw design as a means for creating a new kind of life, ongoing problems with production and distribution meant that furniture was frequently inadequate for small apartments, or simply unavailable. Chapter 7 shows how individuals used the open atmosphere of the period to argue with experts about how apartments should be organised and to apportion blame about their poor quality, lack of facilities, or even the aesthetic unsuitability of ‘modernist’ furniture for Soviet life. They thus illustrated that individuals felt that they had a right to comfort (as they understood it), and that experts had a duty to provide it. Harris’s book contributes significantly to our picture of Soviet society after Stalin. Building on other recent scholarship he shows readers how the mass-housing campaign set into motion both new and old forms of social organisation, ranging from construction co-operatives and house committees to squatting. At the same time, Harris shows how Khrushchev’s campaign generated a sense of entitlement within the Soviet citizenry, and the ways in which citizens’ understanding of these hierarchies of entitlement reinforced social divisions. Despite the rhetoric of universal provision, certain groups felt that their biographies allowed them to jump the queue—and local officials often agreed with them. By focusing on the housing programme at the local level, Harris is able to show how officials sometimes circumvented Party dictates based on their own understanding of the social good. Harris’s book thus allows for a more nuanced understanding of Soviet society than the traditional division of ‘rulers’ and ‘ruled’: there were divisions amongst officials, just as there were divisions within society. What comes across most vividly in the book are the cases where local officials ignored or manipulated orders from above, experts argued amongst themselves, and citizens bickered with both. Indeed, the extent to which ordinary citizens—whether on waiting lists, living in novostroiki, or buying new furniture—were prepared to challenge the authority of cultural arbiters suggests that the traditional intelligentsia mission of social transformation was being challenged from an increasingly self-confident and vocal population. While mentioning Brezhnev only fleetingly (he does not make it into the index), Harris allows us to make links with what we might call the ‘socialist seventies’ to the extent that housing became part of a shared communist way of life which measured welfare not so much by Communist consciousness, but by provision of housing and consumer goods. Harris’s book thus represents a well-written and important addition to scholarly knowledge of the Khrushchev era, which suggests that the Soviet separate apartment should be seen as both a symbol and as a driver of changing social expectations after Stalin’s death.

Russia as a Network State: What Works in Russia When State Institutions Do Not?

addition, the editors did a good job in their selection of the chapters and their placement in the different sections. It does not often happen that articles by different authors are so closely linked to each other as they are in this book. One can hardly expect more in a collected volume. Still there is one more thing to add: the entire content of the book, with the exception of one article, is freely accessible online.