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21. Promoting security sector governance in the EU's neighbourhood

Author:
Heiner Hänggi and Fred Tanner
Publication Date:
07-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
European Union Institute for Security Studies
Abstract:
With the European Union's enlargement eastwards and southwards, its neighbourhood now stretches from the Balkans to the south Caucasus, and from Russia to the southern Mediterranean. The EU's eastern and southern neighbourhood is composed of areas which, to a greater or lesser extent, have serious deficits in security, development and democracy. There are many types of security problems, ranging from weak states and rampant international crime to spoilers in post-conflict reconstruction and unpredictable authoritarian leaders who pursue regime security often at the expense of national or regional security. In terms of socio-economic development, most of the countries in the EU's neighbourhood are fragile, often struggling with the effects of black market economies and cronyism, and burdened by bloated defence and security sectors that escape any accountability. As regards political systems, the EU's neighbourhood is composed of regime types ranging from new but weak democracies to regimes with authoritarian features and limited political participation.
Topic:
Security, Development, and Government
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Caucasus, and Balkans

22. Engaging Putin's Russia: Challenges and Opportunities for the West

Author:
Jason R. Wisniewski
Publication Date:
06-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University
Abstract:
The small and medium-sized states in Southeast Asia have undergone significant geostrategic changes with the end of the Cold War and the rise of China. There has been a lively debate over the last decade about whether these countries would balance against or bandwagon with China, and how their relations with the other major powers in the region would change. Recent works that argue against the simple dichotomy of balancing versus bandwangoning are correct in asserting that Southeast Asian countries do not want to choose between the two major powers, the U.S. and China. But this paper goes further to present the results of an empirical study that fleshes out the conceptual thinking that underlies this avoidance strategy. It finds that instead of merely adopting tactical or time-buying policies, key Southeast Asian states have actively tried to influence the shaping of the new regional order. It argues that key Southeast Asian states in fact have (a) distinct coneptualisations of two main pathways to order in the region omni-enmeshment of major powers and complex balance of influence; and (b) a concrete vision of the preferred power distribution outcome, which is a hierarchical regional order.
Topic:
International Relations and Government
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, China, and Southeast Asia

23. The Complexity of Success: The U.S. Role in Russian Rule of Law Reform

Author:
Matthew J. Spence
Publication Date:
07-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:
MIXED RESULTS FROM THE PROLIFERATION OF WESTERN RULE OF LAW assistance over the past twenty years has taught us much about what efforts do not work. Criminal justice reform in Russia offers a different type of lesson; it is a rare success story of rule of law promotion. In the 1990s, the U.S. government sought to promote the rule of law in many parts of the former Soviet Union and beyond, but few of these efforts outside Russia produced concrete results. Instead, lawlessness became a primary symptom of the apparent failure of many attempted rule of law reforms in the former Soviet Union.
Topic:
International Relations and Government
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, and Europe

24. Beslan: Russia's 9/11?

Author:
John B. Dunlop
Publication Date:
10-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
According to official Russian statistics, in the period between 1-3 September 2004, 330 individuals perished in a terrorist incident at School Number 1 in the town of Beslan in the southern Russian Republic of North Ossetia. Of those who died, 317 were hostages—186 of them children. Ten were soldiers from the Russian FSB's spetsnaz (special forces). Two were personnel from the Russian Ministry for Emergency Situations. One was a resident of Beslan killed while helping to evacuate the hostages during the storming of the building. Seven hundred and twenty-eight persons were said to have been wounded. A majority of the hostages who died—more than 160—perished under the school's collapsed roof. The Mothers of Beslan committee, comprised of mothers of pupils who perished in the building, provided even higher figures. “218 of those killed were found with burns,” they claim.
Topic:
Government, Human Welfare, and Terrorism
Political Geography:
Russia

25. Russian Conservatism in the Putin Presidency

Author:
Sergei Prozorov
Publication Date:
10-2004
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)
Abstract:
The article seeks to map the emergent discursive field of conservatism in Russian politics in the context of the reshapement of the political space in the Putin presidency. In the course of Putin's first presidential term 'conservatism' became a privileged mode of political selfidentification in the Russian discourse, functioning as the nodal point of the hegemonic project of the Presidency. Yet, in accordance with the Foucauldian understanding of discourse as a system of dispersion, the article demonstrates the way the conservative discourse is internally fractured into two antagonistic strands, identified by their practitioners as liberal and left conservatisms. While the liberal-conservative orientation supports and sustains the depoliticising project of the Putin presidency, which orders and stabilises the effects of the anti-communist revolution, left conservatism functions in the modality of radical opposition to the Putinian hegemony, thereby contributing to the pluralisation of political space in contemporary Russia. In the present Russian political constellation 'conservatism' is therefore less a name for a stable hegemonic configuration than a designator of the field of political struggle over the very identity of postcommunist Russia. The article concludes with a critical discussion of the relation the two strands of Russian conservatism establish to the period of the 1990s as the 'moment of the political' in the Russian postcommunist transformation.
Topic:
Democratization, Government, and Politics
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Asia

26. The Presidential Crisis in Lithuania: Its Roots and the Russian Factor

Author:
Richard J. Krickus
Publication Date:
01-2004
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Wilson Center
Abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to address two questions associated with Lithuania's political crisis in 2004. First, what were the domestic circumstances that led to the impeachment of Lithuania's President, Rolandas Paksas? Second, what evidence is there that Russia has played a significant role in the crisis and what are the motives behind Moscow's meddling in Lithuania's internal affairs? Answers to these questions are pertinent to the fate of countries throughout post-communist Europe, given their common history and geography. In addition, they provide the framework for addressing a third question that must be answered by the European Union (EU), NATO and the United States: what can be done about these two-fold threats to the newest members of the Western alliance?
Topic:
Democratization, Government, and Politics
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, Europe, Lithuania, and Moscow

27. Azerbaijan: Turning Over a New Leaf?

Publication Date:
05-2004
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
International Crisis Group
Abstract:
Oil-rich Azerbaijan, which borders Iran, Turkey and Russia and is still scarred from its defeat by Armenia ten years ago, gives cause for both hope and concern. The October 2003 election of Ilham Aliyev to the presidency that his late-father, Heydar, had held almost from independence, highlighted the stark choices which now face the country. Its government is a carefully designed autocratic system, which the father and former Soviet-era politburo member began to construct in the late 1960 s, with heavy reliance on family and clan members, oil revenues and patronage.
Topic:
Development, Government, and Politics
Political Geography:
Russia, Iran, Turkey, Eastern Europe, Armenia, and Azerbaijan

28. Comparing Frameworks of Parliamentary Oversight: Poland, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine

Author:
David Betz
Publication Date:
07-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF)
Abstract:
It is a truism that the nature and limits of parliamentary oversight in any state are determined by the constitutional and political structure unique to that state. That is to say, a state's constitutional and political “framework of legislative oversight” ultimately constrains the extent to which its parliamentarians may regulate their defence establishment. In some countries, parliament has the legal wherewithal to exert a high degree of scrutiny and control over developments in the defence sector. In others, parliaments possess only limited legal prerogatives in this respect because the executive dominates the defence sector.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, Civil Society, and Government
Political Geography:
Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary

29. When Capital Cities Move: The Political Geography of Nation and State Building

Author:
Edward Schatz
Publication Date:
02-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Kellogg Institute for International Studies
Abstract:
Capital relocation (i.e., the physical move of the central state apparatus from one location to another) is an unusual tool for nation and state building. Yet, it is used more frequently than we might expect. Thus, when Kazakhstan shifted its capital city in 1997 from Almaty to Astana the move was unique in that post-Soviet region, but not as uncommon in other post-colonial cases. This paper examines the move of the capital in Kazakhstan suggests that this move was designed to address particularly acute nation-and state-building challenges. If the Kazakhstan experience seems strange in de-Sovietization, this tells us much about the different nature of post-Soviet space versus other post-colonial contexts. The relative in frequency of capital moves implies that the challenges of nation and state building in the ex-USSR—as daunting as they have proved to be—are generally not as acute as in those of other post-colonial contexts.
Topic:
Government and Politics
Political Geography:
Russia, Central Asia, and Kazakhstan

30. Russian Politics under President Vladimir Putin: Current State and Prospects

Author:
Andrei Ryabov
Publication Date:
08-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination, Princeton University
Abstract:
Not too long ago, the analysts studying the development of the Russian political process under Vladimir Putin attached foremost attention to efforts aimed to formulate the political priorities of Russia's second president and to ascertain his vision of the way the nation should develop. The actions and decisions made by Putin were analyzed primarily from that angle. For a long time, that way of analyzing today's Russian politics was regarded as perfectly operational: it is common knowledge that the political system in Russia is monocentric and the president is the principal political agent whose position largely determines the character and the thrust of political change. However, the two years that have elapsed since Putin's rise to power have compelled many experts to revise their attitudes. The reason is that despite the occasional changes in the system of government institutions made by the second president of the Russian Federation and his announcement of a continued market-oriented reform, what lies ahead remains uncertain. There are still doubts about the firmness of the stabilization attained under Putin, while the influence wielded by most of the key Russian political actors who arose back in Yeltsin's times has not diminished whatsoever. In this connection it has even been said that, in the final analysis, Putin will have to return to the policy pursued by his predecessor.
Topic:
Government and Politics
Political Geography:
Russia