Despite implicating ethnicity in everything from civil war to economic failure, researchers seldom consult psychological research when addressing the most basic question: What is ethnicity? The result is a radical scholarly divide generating contradictory recommendations for solving ethnic conflict. Research into how the human brain actually works demands a revision of existing schools of thought. Hale argues ethnic identity is a cognitive uncertainty-reduction device with special capacity to exacerbate, but not cause, collective action problems. This produces a new general theory of ethnic conflict that can improve both understanding and practice. A deep study of separatism in the USSR and CIS demonstrates the theory's potential, mobilizing evidence from elite interviews, three local languages, and mass surveys. The outcome significantly reinterprets nationalism's role in CIS relations and the USSR's breakup, which turns out to have been a far more contingent event than commonly recognized.
This book proposes a new way of understanding events throughout the world that are usually interpreted as democratization, rising authoritarianism, or revolution. Where the rule of law is weak and corruption pervasive, what may appear to be democratic or authoritarian breakthroughs are often just regular, predictable phases in longer-term cyclic dynamics - patronal politics. This is shown through in-depth narratives of the post-1991 political history of all post-Soviet polities that are not in the European Union. This book also includes chapters on czarist and Soviet history and on global patterns.
This book proposes a new way of understanding events throughout the world that are usually interpreted as democratization, rising authoritarianism, or revolution. Where the rule of law is weak and corruption pervasive, what may appear to be democratic or authoritarian breakthroughs are often just regular, predictable phases in longer-term cyclic dynamics - patronal politics. This is shown through in-depth narratives of the post-1991 political history of all post-Soviet polities that are not in the European Union. This book also includes chapters on czarist and Soviet history and on global patterns.
Russia poses a major puzzle for theorists of party development. Whereas virtually every classic work takes political parties to be inevitable and essential to democracy, Russia has been dominated by non-partisan politicians ever since communism collapsed. This book mobilizes public opinion surveys, interviews with leading Russian politicians, careful tracking of multiple campaigns, and analysis of national and regional voting patterns to show why Russia stands out. Russia's historically influenced combination of federalism and super-presidentialism, coupled with a post-communist redistribution of resources to regional political machines and oligarchic financial-industrial groups, produced and sustained powerful party-substitutes that have largely squeezed Russia's real parties out, damaging Russia's democratic development.
With Russian shells raining on Kyiv and tanks closing in, American forces prepared to evacuate Ukraine’s leader. Just three years earlier, his apparent main qualification had been playing a president on TV. But Volodymyr Zelensky reportedly retorted, ‘I need ammunition, not a ride.’ Ukrainian forces won the battle for Kyiv, ensuring their country’s independence even as a longer war began for the southeast. You cannot understand the historic events of 2022 without understanding Zelensky. But the Zelensky effect is less about the man himself than about the civic nation he embodies: what makes Zelensky most extraordinary in war is his very ordinariness as a Ukrainian. The Zelensky Effect explains this paradox, exploring Ukraine’s national history to show how its now-iconic president reflects the hopes and frustrations of the country’s first ‘independence generation’. Interweaving social and political background with compelling episodes from Zelensky’s life and career, this is the story of Ukraine told through the journey of one man who has come to symbolise his country.
Despite implicating ethnicity in everything from civil war to economic failure, researchers seldom consult psychological research when addressing the most basic question: What is ethnicity? The result is a radical scholarly divide generating contradictory recommendations for solving ethnic conflict. Research into how the human brain actually works demands a revision of existing schools of thought. Hale argues ethnic identity is a cognitive uncertainty-reduction device with special capacity to exacerbate, but not cause, collective action problems. This produces a new general theory of ethnic conflict that can improve both understanding and practice. A deep study of separatism in the USSR and CIS demonstrates the theory's potential, mobilizing evidence from elite interviews, three local languages, and mass surveys. The outcome significantly reinterprets nationalism's role in CIS relations and the USSR's breakup, which turns out to have been a far more contingent event than commonly recognized.
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