New publications

New publications

Luca Tomini (ed.): Democratizing Central and Eastern Europe. Successes and failures of the European Union, UK 2015, 180pp. ISBN: 978-1-13-883182-7

At first, it was believed that accession to the EU would have a positive effect on the process of democratization in former communist countries. However, over time it became clear that difficulties with the democratic system endured in a number of these countries. This book reconsiders the results of the process of democratization in Central…

Read more >>

Dinissa Duvanova (ed.): Building Business in Post-Communist Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. Collective Goods, Selective Incentives, and Predatory States, UK 2015, 267pp. ISBN:9781107030169

Prior to 1989, the communist countries of Eastern Europe and the USSR lacked genuine employer and industry associations. After the collapse of communism, industry associations mushroomed throughout the region. Duvanova argues that abusive regulatory regimes discourage the formation of business associations and poor regulatory enforcement tends to encourage associational membership growth. Academic research often treats…

Read more >>

David Gillespie (ed.): Masculinity, Violence and Power in Modern Russia Men, Guns and Identity, UK 2015, 256pp. ISBN: 978-0-415-67064-7

This book explores the phenomenon of violence in Russian culture, showing how violence has been a legitimate articulation of masculinity in Russia, and how popular attitudes towards violence have differed from those in the west, with Russians often approving of violence and of macho, militaristic political leadership. The book examines the nature of violence and…

Read more >>

Erica T. Lehrer and Michael Meng (eds.): Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland, USA 2015, 312pp. ISBN: 9780253015006

In a time of national introspection regarding the country’s involvement in the persecution of Jews, Poland has begun to reimagine spaces of and for Jewishness in the Polish landscape, not as a form of nostalgia but as a way to encourage the pluralization of contemporary society. The essays in this book explore issues of the…

Read more >>

Maple Razsa (ed.): Bastards of Utopia, Living Radical Politics after Socialism, 2015, 312pp. ISBN: 9780253015860

Bastards of Utopia, the companion to a feature documentary film of the same name, explores the experiences and political imagination of young radical activists in the former Yugoslavia, participants in what they call alterglobalization or “globalization from below.” Ethnographer Maple Razsa follows individual activists from the transnational protests against globalization of the early 2000s through…

Read more >>

Albert Baiburin, Catriona Kelly, Nikolai Vakhtin (eds.): Russian Cultural Anthropology after the Collapse of Communism, 2015, 304pp. ISBN: 978-0-415-69504-6

In Soviet times, anthropologists in the Soviet Union were closely involved in the state’s work of nation building. They helped define official nationalities, and gathered material about traditional customs and suitably heroic folklore, whilst at the same time refraining from work on the reality of contemporary Soviet life. Since the end of the Soviet Union…

Read more >>

Susanne Oxenstierna (ed.): The Challenges for Russia’s Politicized Economic System, 2015, 242pp. ISBN: 9781138796621

During the early 2000s the market liberalization reforms to the Russian economy, begun in the 1990s, were consolidated, but since the mid 2000s economic policy has moved into a new phase, characterized by more state intervention with less efficiency and more structural problems. Corruption, weak competitiveness, heavy dependency on energy exports, an unbalanced labour market,…

Read more >>

Vojtech Mastny, Zhu Liqun (eds.): The Legacy of the Cold War, Perspectives on Security, Cooperation, and Conflict. 2015, 388pp. ISBN: 9780739187890

The unexpected end of the protracted conflict has been a sobering experience for scholars. No theory had anticipated how the Cold War would be terminated, and none should also be relied upon to explicate its legacy. But instead of relying on preconceived formulas to project past developments, taking a historical perspective to explain their causes…

Read more >>

Mark Harrison (ed.): Guns and Rubles: The Defense Industry in the Stalinist State. 2014, 300pp. ISBN: 0300209126

For this book a distinguished team of economists and historians-R. W. Davies, Paul R. Gregory, Andrei Markevich, Mikhail Mukhin, Andrei Sokolov, and Mark Harrison-scoured formerly closed Soviet archives to discover how Stalin used rubles to make guns. Focusing on various aspects of the defense industry, a top-secret branch of the Soviet economy, the volume’s contributors…

Read more >>

Georges Mink, Laure Neumayer (eds.): History, Memory and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe. Memory games, 2015, 288pp. ISBN: 978-0-230-35433-3

Twenty years after the end of communism, the history of Central and Eastern Europe still sparks intense discussions in the former Soviet bloc, as contested memories, primarily about communist repression and WWII, are relived. This volume goes beyond the state-centred approach that so often characterises the study of memory-issues in post-communist countries and highlights two…

Read more >>

pagetop