5 As they insert themselves into the realm of politics, the new information and communications technologies [ICT] are not only qualitatively altering old concepts, attitudes, and stereotypes in the area of political communications but are also altering many forms of behavior and models of relationships between political institutions and individuals. Electronic democracy 10 is any democratic political system in which ICT are used to perform the most important functions of the democratic process as well as to explore the public’s interests and adopt decisions. Electronic democracy is associated with the use of ICT to support democratic processes, adopt political decisions, to broadly involve citizens in these processes, and to strengthen 15 representative democracy. The major mechanisms through which ICT can support electronic democracy are access to the Internet through various channels (home internet and/or access to the web in public places), mobile phones, and interactive (formerly cable, now digital) television. The concept of electro20 nic/digital democracy rethinks the structure of communications between “the people and the government”; it is considered not merely a new stage in the development of democratic institutions that is capable of giving citizens the ability to interact conveniently with government bodies but also a way to reframe the issue of democracy. 25 According to the Recommendations of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted in February 2009, electronic democracy encompasses a variety of concepts: e-parliament, e-legislation, e-justice, e-mediation, e-initiative, e-elections, e-referendum, e-voting, e-consultation, e-petitioning, e-campaigning, e-polling, and e-surveying.
Social anxiety among the population can be viewed in the context of its social security, that is, the subjective sense that the most important features of the constantly changing environment are safe. Existing studies of these topics, as a rule, focus on macrophenomena, on the national and global levels. In other words, what is usually at issue is the social anxiety of the citizens of a country or group of countries. The case of organizing and holding the 2018 World Cup in a relatively small Russian regional center—Saransk, the capital of the Republic of Mordovia—makes it possible to explore this aspect at the local level of a specific city. A large-scale sports event does not merely affect the day-today life of a city’s residents, which is typical of megapolises as well, but also changes it in significant ways by making it follow the event’s own laws. During the several years that precede the Cup, daily life is largely driven by preparations for the event. The expectations and inner stresses felt by the residents of Saransk may differ in content and degree of manifestation from the feelings and emotions of the inhabitants of other, larger cities that organized the Cup. Unlike them, the Mordovian capital had not had experience holding events on a comparable scale—it had never had such scrutiny from the international community. All this caused the city’s residents to worry about how safe the arrangement of the mega sports event would be and whether the established plan would be successfully implemented. During the days when the matches took place, Saransk attracted large numbers of Russian and foreign fans, amounting at times to more than 13 percent of the city’s population. Such episodic migration disrupts the stability of the social world of the city’s residents. The urban environment
Projects to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad have predictably given rise to a wave of public debates about the history of the siege: its significance for the city’s and country’s history, the correspondence of existing memory to the scale of the tragedy, and the adequacy of the state’s practices to commemorate it. One of the main characteristics of contemporary conversations about the siege is their discursiveness—a common genre characteristic that sets most publications in the press and media apart. All the initiatives and artistic statements in memory of the blockade have been the subject of protracted and often difficult debate. As an example, here are some excerpts from articles on the new museum devoted to the siege, which was only recently planned for construction in St. Petersburg: “Debates surrounding the new Siege of Leningrad museum spur discussions about how we remember those 900 terrifying days”; “Debates about the new museum on Smolnaia Embankment continue”; and “Siege survivors ask that money not be spent on a new museum.” Amid “public muteness,” discussion of the siege became a trope for public debates, engaging and disengaging participants to an equal degree. Members of different social groups, generations, and professions became involved in conversations about how the siege should be remembered. In this essay, I would like to look at the rhetorical models used in the debates over siege memory and the arguments participants use to justify their various positions. Making a conscious effort to remove myself from these discussions,
The measurement and analysis of the trendlines and structure of people ’ s opinions on socioeconomic issues (family income and consumption, the labor-market situation, individual business opportunities
In November 2014 one of the organizers of the Russian March, Dmitrii Demushkin, announced that the movement had collapsed, and in November 2018 this was confirmed by the Russian nationalist Egor Kholmogorov, who lamented that the movement was not fated to celebrate its fifteenth anniversary. Why did the movement that was launched with great enthusiasm in 2005, in hopes that a “Russian spring” would soon follow, end in failure? How did it emerge? What were its tenets, and what goals did it set? What was the makeup of its participants, what was their attitude toward the Russian government, and what kind of future were they preparing for Russia? Why was there no unity in the movement, why was it plagued by schisms, and what caused it to decline after 2013? All these questions are quite timely since, first, they directly pertain to the specific features of contemporary Russian nationalism and the prospects for its further development, and second, they enable a discussion of the assessment of the march by experts—from “a respectable conservative movement,” according to rightwing ideologues, to “a brownshirt march” in the eyes of liberals, leftists, and human-rights advocates. To understand the atmosphere in which the Russian March originated, we must take a look at what the year 2005 was like for Russia. On the one hand, the second war in Chechnya had concluded by then, and thanks to a successful upsurge in the oil and gas sector, Russia had begun to emerge from the financial and economic crisis of the late 1990s, and the living standard of its population had begun gradually to improve. On the other, the end of the Chechen war was marred by a horrible terrorist attack in Beslan (in the Republic of North Ossetia—Alania) on September 1, 2004, and the development of the raw-material economy was accompanied by an aggressive government policy toward business (the “Yukos affair”). The start of President Vladimir Putin’s second term was marked by
Over the past few years we have seen the government and academic circles paying close attention to the problem of social hardship for 5 Russians. Beginning with the 2014 economic recession, scholars have been rethinking the concept of neediness; a number of regions have adjusted social-support measures, implementing principles of targeted assistance; the results of scholarly and practical activities have been brought up on debate platforms; and in the new vector of the country’s 10 socioeconomic development for the next six years, laid out by the president in a 2018 address, the main goals included the goal of cutting the scale of poverty in half. Interest in the problem of social hardship has been shaped by a number of objective factors. First, we can state as a fact that the typical living 15 standard of Russians is one of privation. Broad strata of the population carry fairly high risks of falling into poverty in the long term, as illustrated by the existence of a “floating” zone of poverty in which people slip into the ranks of the poor population during economic recessions. Second, the social hardship of broad strata of the population is 20 a significant obstacle to implementing the newly publicized economic vector of development, based on an increase in investment in human capital and making the country more competitive in the international arena. The low living standard impedes the accumulation of human capital, which reinforces the tenuous situation of a substantial segment of 25 Russians. Recall that A. Sen already noted, as a result of reinterpreting the global crisis of 2008–2009, that qualitative economic growth in developed societies can be achieved only on the basis of monitoring and adjusting living standards and the scale of poverty (not only absolute but relative poverty).
The past 20 years under the rule of Vladimir Putin, his close circle, and his enormous number of supporters at all levels of the government provide an instructive example of how to take advantage of public and private resources and the institutional characteristics of electoral authoritarianism. In spite of the political crisis of 2011 and 2012, we cannot say that this regime has experienced serious difficulties or faced dangerous challenges over the 20 years of its existence. And no matter how much opposition publicists are focusing on signs of a crisis, it’s hard to agree with them right now: The regime is actively and quite flexibly reacting to changes in the political and, specifically, electoral situation in the country as it prepares for the 2021 parliamentary elections and, most importantly, the 2024 presidential election, which marks the end of Putin’s second of “two terms in a row” enshrined in the Constitution. The problem, of course, is not that figures in the regime have made a thorough study of specialists’ work on electoral authoritarianism or that they consult with them, while the opposition does not. They are merely opportunistically and deviously seeking and finding newer and newer ways to apply “rules to rule by” in changing circumstances. Their efforts have taken the shape of an institutionalized form of a personalist electoral authoritarian regime. If it were more profitable to cancel the elections, or introduce (one-)party rule, or even establish a military dictatorship, then the corresponding political system would be the side effect of their activities. Control over state resources is the basic condition for endlessly prolonging rule. Even though there have been isolated glitches caused by assorted interests within the ruling group and the government and problems with coordination, a huge advantage in resources over other political groups has given the regime the chance to fix its errors: All it has to do is avoid critical strategic miscalculations—everything else can be fixed. In principle, the
Under Vladimir Putin, the Russian Orthodox Church and the state have started to cooperate much more closely. During Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, the Church was forced to press for a new law on freedom of conscience and religious associations that benefited it by circumventing the Kremlin (Yeltsin vetoed this law in 1997 and signed a modified version only later, after negotiations). Going around the president became impossible in the 2000s. True, during Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency the Church did get what it asked for—the introduction of the class “The Foundations of Orthodox Culture” in schools, restitution of Church property, and the creation of the institution of military clergy—but Vladimir Putin did not object. The law on criminal prosecution for offending the feelings of believers was adopted during Putin’s third presidential term. This raises the question of mechanisms for cooperation between the president and the Orthodox clergy on a personal level. The relationship between the head of state and the leader of the dominant religion is often official and, as a consequence, formal in nature. Here we can cite the experience of the first patriarchy in Russia (1589–1721) from the time it was instituted until the time it was liquidated by Peter I. During this period, there were only three cases of close personal relations between the tsar and the patriarch: Job and Boris Godunov (the patriarch as a protégé and faithful political ally of the tsar, who lost the throne after Job’s death); Filaret and Mikhail Romanov (father and son); and Nikon and Alexei Romanov (friendship/mentorship degenerating into enmity). In all other cases, the relationships between the leaders of the Church and the state remained strictly official. In today’s Russia, the relationship between
The many years of research by the Levada Center on the public opinion of Russians, their attitudes toward the government, the judicial system, and law-enforcement bodies attest to the ambivalence of the mass attitudes of Russia’s population and the extreme relativism or nihilism of its legal consciousness. A substantial proportion of people view the courts and law-enforcement bodies as a system that primarily protects the interests of the government or groups close to it, that possess significant resources of administrative influence. But along with the attitude toward these institutions as primarily repressive or as serving a corrupt bureaucracy, there persist firmly entrenched notions that somewhere, far from the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, there still are “institutions of justice,” of protection against arbitrary behavior. It is hard to find justice in the entities with which an ordinary person most often deals or may deal—in the police, the lowest level courts (magistrates, raion, city, and other courts), among bailiffs, investigators, or low-level prosecutors—and there persists toward them a firm negative attitude, distrust, and suspicions of bias, formalism, indifference and brutality, immorality, and corruption. But toward the higher Russian courts or, to a greater degree, the European Court of Human Rights, the top leadership of the MVD, the Prosecutor General’s Office, and the FSB, the attitudes are different: They are idealized, imbued with an aura of honesty, incorruptibility, and so on. This means that the mass consciousness reproduces the values of law and justice, but specifically as a utopian horizon, as notions of how it should be rather than how it is in reality. Some opinions are predetermined by the work of institutions of education, culture, socialization, and propaganda, while others shaped by the practical experience of life and personal interaction with law-enforcement bodies.
For decades a host of observers have periodically declared that North Korea is on the verge of collapse. Yet in practice the regime has demonstrated considerable resilience and will most likely last for a long time to come. This article explores both the factors posing a potential threat to the regime’s stability (above all, its contiguity with rich, free, and attractive South Korea) and the factors contributing to its stability (the cohesiveness of elites). North Korea’s policy during the period since 2011 is analyzed as a set of measures that are primarily designed to help neutralize external and internal threats to the regime’s stability. Although a sudden collapse of the Kim family regime is hypothetically possible, it is more probable that the it retain control of the country for the foreseeable future.
International news plays a major role in today’s world. Researchers point out its substantial influence on the public’s conceptions about other countries and peoples, as well as its importance in the determination of the directions of international politics. Given its specific historical, geographic, and economic characteristics, Russia actively participates in various international processes. In particular, it is a full-fledged member of the G20—the elite club that determines the direction of development of the modern world. In light of the intensifying political and economic competition in the world arena, a struggle is under way between various countries for the news media’s agenda. According to research, international news is more strongly influenced by government policy than is the coverage of domestic events, and the dominant ideological attitudes may result in biased preparation of media content on other countries. The news media often construct an image of certain countries as “provocateurs” in the world arena without paying attention to the motives of representatives of those countries. Since international news does not allow the “provocateur” countries to defend themselves, not all viewpoints end up being represented. International news not only covers events and processes abroad but also communicates the key values of the country that produces this news. There are a large number of studies that prove that reports on foreign events are influenced by the interests of elites. For example, military operations in which a country is involved are covered less critically than conflicts that are completely external. Therefore, mentions of other countries in the news media of foreign countries are not merely a mirror of reality that reflects those events and processes. Mutual mentions by countries of each other
The definition of the term “generation” continues to be among the most lacking in conceptual clarity, and researchers and scholars tend to avoid it. Yet generations are just as important as social classes and genders in explaining individual and group differences in culture, interests, and behavior. The sociological approach to analyzing the phenomenon of generations is represented by K. Mannheim, who proposed the idea of “social location” as the most important characteristic of a generation, based on which “a group of individuals share a common location in the social and historical process, and thereby they are limited to a specific range of potential experience, predisposing them for a certain characteristic mode of thought (our emphasis—Author) and experience.” Four basic approaches have been defined for the periodization and study of generations. They are: (a) genealogical kinship (generations of children and parents); (b) age cohorts (young and older generations); (c) periods of life and socialization; (d) historical periods (the 1968 generation, the postwar generation). Often these principles for categorizing generations are combined. Under the approach of the Russian sociologist Yu. Levada, the twentieth-century generational sequence in Russia numbered six generations. This approach was based on combining the concept of the significance of historical events (and their related processes) with age. Considering the sample design in Russia-wide mass surveys and natural population decline, it should be noted that the first three generations, born before 1929, are for practical purposes unrepresented at present. The analysis is therefore limited to the generations of the Thaw, Stagnation, and Perestroika out of the six types originally proposed by Levada (Table 1).
far-reaching political do not emerge from the same and in the same way in the post-totalitarian system as they do in a democracy. And if a large portion of the public is indifferent to, even skeptical of, alternative political models and programs and the private estab-lishment of opposition political parties, this is not merely because there is a general feeling of apathy toward public affairs and a loss of that sense of higher responsibility; in other words, it is not just a consequence of the general demoralization. There is also a bit of healthy social instinct at work in this attitude. It is as if people sensed intuitively that ‘nothing is what it seems any longer,’ as the saying goes, and that from now on, therefore, things must be done entirely differently as well.”
The most important manifestations of the crisis of modern democracy, which has apparently stemmed from the postindustrial transition, the beginning of the passage of human civilization to a new technological stage of development—often described as “the fourth industrial revolution”—have been the increase in national egoism and populism and the desire to seal off “alien” cultures and their purveyors. In the practical politics of developed countries this leads to an upsurge in antiimmigrant and xenophobic attitudes; to a major strengthening of the positions of national populist parties and movements; to the return of protectionism to international economic relations; and to an effort to pit national interests against the trends associated with the formation of a postindustrial, planetwide civilization and against the commitments of nations based on their membership in various integrative organizations. The rejection of the formative process of a planetwide civilization, including the component of globalization, and of the problems arising in connection with this process, derives from the positions of conservative criticism of the new civilizational reality. As part of this criticism, what is usually contrasted with modern society, with its interpenetration of cultures, blurred boundaries between social groups, and lack of impermeable borders between countries, are the societies of the recent past with their well-defined national interests and clear-cut borders, their social and cultural hierarchies.
ABSTRACT This article explores the efforts undertaken by Russia together with Syrian authorities to bring Syrian refugees home since the conclusion of the major combat operations in the summer of 2018. It focuses on analyzing the Russian approach and its primary elements, the organizational entities taking measures to return the refugees, and their functions. It sums up the results of the first year of the program of returning refugees to Syria. It also examines the obstacles impeding the return of Syrian refugees on a mass scale. The author shows the inappropriateness of efforts to put the entire responsibility for refugees’ return on Russia alone, which was forced to take on the role of chief foreign sponsor of the process due to the passivity of other powers.
This article analyzes U.S. policy in the South China Sea (SCS) during the presidency of D. Trump and examines American strategic interests, objectives, and missions in the region. It explores U.S. policy in the context of the “Indo-Pacific strategy” that became the doctrinal basis of the Trump administration’s policy course in the Asia-Pacific Region (APAC). It takes note of the new level of adversarial relations between the United States and China, which has posed a serious challenge to American military dominion in the SCS and the APAC region. In recent years the United States has significantly increased the scale and frequency of naval maneuvers in the South China Sea. It was under the Trump administration that the United States began actively to recruit its allies, including from outside region, for joint operations in the SCM. Particular attention is devoted to the so-called Freedom of Navigation Operations that the U.S. Navy conducts in the disputed waters. These operations have a dual purpose: On the one hand, they are positioned as peacemaking operations intended solely to protect freedom of navigation; on the other, they are the United States’ principal tool for containing Chinese military ambitions, thereby leading to heightened tensions in the region.
The events of November 23–26, 2018, in the Black Sea near the entrance to the Kerch Strait, resulted in Russia’s detention of Ukrainian Navy ships and sailors. This crisis confronted the community of experts of the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and third countries with a host of thorny questions. How legitimate were Russia’s actions in terms of international law? Did it overstep its authority? Was there a planned provocation by Ukraine? Who bears the greater responsibility for the incident? What political and legal consequences could come out of it? The article explores answers to these questions.
This article is the republished version of:The Spiral of Repressiveness: Internal Dynamics, and Problems of Entry and Exit
At the end of April 2020, Iran and the United States again exchanged harsh statements regarding each other’s naval operations in the Persian Gulf and threatened to use force against each other. While there was nothing new in the exchange of threats, two aspects are cause for concern. First, the exchange of statements came after a pause that lasted several months following the assassination by the American military of Qosem. Soleimani, a high-ranking officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in January 2020. The sharp escalation at the time forced Tehran to be more cautious in its statements and actions, and the subsequent outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic completely distracted the two sides from continuing the conflict. Their return to aggressive rhetoric suggests that the United States and Iran have adjusted to the new conditions and are ready to continue their traditional game of “chicken.” Second, the Iranian–American tensions flared at a particularly unfavorable moment. This flare-up will inevitably heighten the apprehensions of consumers of oil from the Persian Gulf region regarding potential threats to the security of raw-material supplies. The escalation, however, will not primarily harm the interests of consumers, as was the case in previous decades (from the 1970s to the 2000s), when the very presence of a threat to oil exports from the region’s countries led to oil price increases. This time the main victims will be the regional producers, who could lose their traditional customers. This reflects both a result of the current evolution of the world oil market, in which the rules of the game are no longer set by the producers of oil but by its consumers, and a shift of emphasis in the safeguarding of the Gulf states’ energy security.
O human image made of water and protein, destined for the contours of the grave: let me perish, my lips against yours! —Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain 1 Franz Kafka lived for forty years, falling ...
