Mark R. Beissinger

Structure and Example in Modular Political Phenomena: The Diffusion of Bulldozer/Rose/Orange/Tulip Revolutions

Thearticledevelopsanapproachtothestudyofmodularpoliticalphenomena(actionbasedinsignificantpartonemulationofthe prior successful example of others), focusing on the trade-offs between the influence of example, structural facilitation, and institutionalconstraints.Theapproachisillustratedthroughtheexampleofthespreadofdemocraticrevolutioninthepost-communist region during the 2000‐2006 period, with significant comparisons to the diffusion of separatist nationalism in the Soviet Union during the glasnost’era.Two models by which modular processes unfold are specified: an elite defection model and an elite learning model. In both models the power of example is shown to exert an independent effect on outcomes, although the effect is considerably deeper in the former than in the latter case.The elite defection model corresponds to the institutional responses to separatist nationalism under glasnost’, while the elite learning model describes well the processes involved in the spread modular democratic revolution among later risers in the post-communist region, limiting the likelihood of further revolutionary successes.The article concludeswithsomethoughtsabouttheimplicationsofthepowerofexampleforthestudyofmodularphenomenasuchasdemocratization, nationalism, and revolution.

The Semblance of Democratic Revolution: Coalitions in Ukraine's Orange Revolution

Using two unusual surveys, this study analyzes participation in the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, comparing participants with revolution supporters, opponents, counter-revolutionaries, and the apathetic/inactive. As the analysis shows, most revolutionaries were weakly committed to the revolutions democratic master narrative, and the revolutions spectacular mobilizational success was largely due to its mobilization of cultural cleavages and symbolic capital to construct a negative coalition across diverse policy groupings. A contrast is drawn between urban civic revolutions like the Orange Revolution and protracted peasant revolutions. The strategies associated with these revolutionary models affect the roles of revolutionary organization and selective incentives and the character of revolutionary coalitions. As the comparison suggests, postrevolutionary instability may be built into urban civic revolutions due to their reliance on a rapidly convened negative coalition of hundreds of thousands, distinguished by fractured elites, lack of consensus over fundamental policy issues, and weak commitment to democratic ends.

Beyond State Crisis?: Postcolonial Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in Comparative Perspective

Part I Overview and Retrospective: 1. Introduction - Comparing State Crises Across Two Continents, Mark Beissinger and Crawford Young 2. Convergence to Crisis - Pre-Independence State Legacies and Post-Independence State Breakdown in Africa and Eurasia, Mark Beissinger and Crawford Young. Part II Sovereignty, Violence, and War: 3. At the Edge of the World - Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty, Achille Mbembe 4. Who is Strong When the State is Weak? - Violent Entreprenuership in Russias Emerging Markets, Vadim Volkov 5. Mafiya Trouble, Warlord Crises, Will Reno 6. Weak State and Private Armies, Charles Fairbanks 7. Civil Wars and State-Building in Africa and Eurasia, David Holloway and Stephen Stedman 8. The Effects of Interstate Crisis on African Interstate Relations (With Eurasian Comparisons), Donald Rothchild. Part III Democratization and Political Economy: 9. Russia - Unconsolidated Democracy, Creeping Authoritarianism, or Unresolved Stagnation? Lilia Shevtsova 10. War, State Making, and Democratization in Africa, Richard Joseph 11. The East Goes South - International Aid and the Production of Convergence in Africa and Eurasia, Peter J. Stavrakis 12. Economic Reform and the Discourse of Democracy in Africa - Resolving the Contradictions, Peter M. Lewis. Part IV State and Society: 13. Accomodating Ethnic Differences in Post-Soviet Eurasia, Gail W. Lapidus 14. Beyond Cultural Domination - Institutionalizing Equity in the African State, Francis M. Deng 15. Women and Political Change in Eurasia and Africa, Aili Mari Tripp. Part V Beyond State Crisis?: 16. Putting the State Back Together in Post-Soviet Georgia, Ghia Nodia 17. After the Fall - State Rehabilitation in Uganda, Crawford Young 18. Transcending the Crisis of the State in Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia - Hopeless Chimera or Possible Dream?, Mark Beissinger and Crawford Young.

A New Look at Ethnicity and Democratization

Political scientists have long believed that ethnic diversity and strongly-held national identities work against the cause of democratic consolidation, yet new evidence reveals that this need not be so, and even suggests that these factors can, under certain conditions, work in its favor. And while there is evidence that ethnic diversity correlates with poor government performance, lower rates of aggregate economic growth, and ineffective provision of public goods, these relationships are subject to qualification. A diverse set of cases suggest that institutional choices are a crucial factor in determining whether ethnic diversity and national identity work for or against democratic consolidation. In the case of three unambiguously successful postcommunist democracies—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—ethnic nationalism was crucial in the transition to free self-government.

an interrelated wave

Abstract: In contrast to the arguments of those who study the color revolutions as an interrelated phenomenon, Lucan Way’s highly structural account considers the failure of authoritarian consolidation causally sufficient, something that obviates the need to explain opposition mobilization against the state and its role in the collapse of these regimes. Yet for scholars who take the politics of mobilization seriously, such arguments fail on several accounts. First, authoritarian weakness alone cannot address the contingencies involved in the process of mobilization. Second, it cannot explain why these revolutions assumed similar forms across diverse contexts. And third, it does not tell us why attempts at revolution rapidly proliferated across so many different contexts during a compressed period of time. Authoritarian weakness alone cannot explain why the mobilization process during the color revolutions assumed similar forms across varied contexts.

Nationalism and the Collapse of Soviet Communism

This article examines the role of nationalism in the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, arguing that nationalism (both in its presence and its absence, and in the various conflicts and disorders that it unleashed) played an important role in structuring the way in which communism collapsed. Two institutions of international and cultural control in particular – the Warsaw Pact and ethnofederalism – played key roles in determining which communist regimes failed and which survived. The article argues that the collapse of communism was not a series of isolated, individual national stories of resistance but a set of interrelated streams of activity in which action in one context profoundly affected action in other contexts – part of a larger tide of assertions of national sovereignty that swept through the Soviet empire during this period.

Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe

1. The historical legacies of communism: an empirical agenda Stephen Kotkin and Mark R. Beissinger 2. Communist development and the post-communist democratic deficit Grigore Pop-Eleches 3. Room for error: the economic legacy of Soviet spatial misallocation Clifford G. Gaddy 4. Legacies of industrialization and paths of transnational integration after Socialism Bela Greskovits 5. The limits of legacies: property rights in Russian energy Timothy Frye 6. Legacies and departures in the Russian state executive Eugene Huskey 7. From police state to police state? Legacies and law enforcement in Russia Brian D. Taylor 8. How judges arrest and acquit: Soviet legacies in post-communist criminal justice Alexei Trochev 9. Historical roots of religious influence on post-communist democratic politics Anna Grzymala-Busse 10. Soviet nationalities policies and the discrepancy between ethnocultural identification and language practice in Ukraine Volodymyr Kulyk 11. Pokazukha and cardiologist Khrenov: Soviet legacies, legacy theater, and a usable past Jessica Pisano.THE PAST NOT ONLY MATTERS FOR SCHOLARS AND STUDENTS OF HISTORY, but generally speaking affects all systems and subsystems that humans create in order to organise communal life. This edited volume provides a research agenda and ten research-based empirical studies by well-known scholars applying the legacy argument to different fields such as law enforcement, economy, politics, culture and media. The strength of the volume is that it presents a broad overview of the study of legacies in the postcommunist space, focusing on the most relevant puzzles linked to the relationship between past and present. Grigore Pop-Eleches asks why the fairly high socioeconomic development of the Soviet Union did not lead to the emergence of democracy in Russia and all other former Soviet republics after 1991. Clifford G. Gaddy asks why Russia’s economic geography is distorted. For Timothy Frye the question is why was the privatisation of natural resource industries in Russia in the 1990s followed by the renationalisation of the 2000s. Alexei Trochev asks why judges in post-communist countries avoid acquittals. Anna Grzymala-Busse asks why churches in some post-communist countries have strong political influence, while they are weak in others. And finally, Volodomyr Kulyk asks why there is a discrepancy between ethnic identification and language use in Ukraine. By addressing these and other puzzles employing legacy arguments, the volume provides the reader with valuable insights not only into the variety of legacies and legacy mechanisms, but also its selective impact and, as a result, the diverse outcomes of development paths in Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia after 1989 and 1991. To the best of my knowledge, there is no publication that covers the broad, complex and ambiguous field of legacies in the post-communist space in such comparable depth and with such concentrated expertise, which makes it a useful purchase for both advanced students and scholars. The main weakness of the volume, however, is its lack of a comprehensive conceptual framework. The editors claim that this is ‘not needed’ (p. 3), and suggest a research agenda exploring the field ‘empirically, contextually, and with greater rigor’ (p. 3) instead. The consequence is the dilution of scientific concepts. Legacies are defined as ‘durable causal relationships’ between past and the subsequent present (p. 7) around at least one ‘macrohistorical rupture’ (p. 8). ‘Rupture’ is insufficiently conceptualised; it could be ‘revolution, state collapse, decolonisation, or major incidents of regime change’, the editors argue (p. 8). Still, in some of the empirical studies, the authors do not properly differentiate between legacies and continuities, legacies and development, and legacies and traditions. All merge into one, and sometimes the reader has the impression that Russian politics is, after all, still basically tsarist in its nature (as in the chapter by Eugene Huskey). This leads to another weakness: the temporal positioning of the (imagined) origin of legacies and subsequent research problems. The volume is, according to its title, addressing legacies linked to communism. However, many of the fields explored do not only have communist, but also precommunist legacies—which the authors point out. This is relevant, for instance, for religious influence on politics, nationalities policies, and pokazukha (‘window dressing’). In this respect, the title that refers to communist legacies only is problematic; moreover it reveals a methodological problem: how do we deal analytically with different layers of legacies (for example, pre-Soviet and Soviet), particularly when they are contradictory? How can we explain why in some cases pre-communist EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES Vol. 67, No. 5, July 2015, 831–844

Beyond the Nationalities Question

While the collapse of the Soviet Union altered tremendously the configuration of power in Eurasia, the nationality issues that played such a critical role in fueling the Soviet collapse have hardly dissipated, but remain very much a part of the Eurasian landscape. Issues associated with cultural difference are openly discussed, and groups engage in autonomous self-organization in ways that could not have been imagined in Soviet times.

Self-determination as a Technology of Imperialism: The Soviet and Russian Experiences

Abstract Self-determination is widely understood as an anti-imperial norm responsible in significant part for the global break-up of empires. But self-determination norms have been utilized as well to justify Great Power territorial expansion. This essay examines the ways in which self-determination norms have been wielded by the Soviet Union and Russia to justify overriding sovereignty norms, challenge the territorial integrity of weaker states, and rationalize an expansion of power and influence—despite opposition by a majority of inhabitants of the affected areas, the conflicting self-determination claims of indigenous populations, massive Russian settler colonization, and the opinions of the international community.