Article
Relative Deprivation as a Factor of Sociopolitical Destabilization: Toward a Quantitative Comparative Analysis of the Arab Spring Events
The article analyzes relative deprivation as a possible factor of sociopolitical instability during the Arab Spring events using the methods of correlation and multiple regression analysis. In this case, relative deprivation is operationalized in two ways: (a) through the indicator of subjective feeling of happiness on the eve of the events of the Arab Spring, and (b) through the scale of decrease of the subjective feeling of happiness on the eve of the events of Arab Spring. It is shown that the change in the level of subjective feeling of happiness between 2009 and 2010 is a powerful, statistically significant predictor of the level of destabilization in Arab countries in 2011. The next most powerful predictor is the mean value of the subjective feeling of happiness in the corresponding country for 2010. At the same time, the fundamental economic indicators we tested, while controlling for them, have turned out to be extremely weak and at the same time statistically insignificant predictors of the level of sociopolitical instability in the Arab countries in 2011.
The results of the State Duma election and the public reaction to it revealed a quali tatively new political situation. New social forces entered the political arena. The period between parliamentary and presidential elections will be a period of re-fl ection of this situation and practical conclusions for both the government and the society. The main task of Russian society is to ensure a second round of the presidential election with an unpredictable ending.
It is not surprising that Mubarak’s administration “overlooked” the social explosion. Indeed, statistical data righteously claimed that the country was developing very successfully. Economic growth rates were high (even in the crisis years). Poverty and inequality levels were among the lowest in the Third World. Global food prices were rising, but the government was taking serious measures to mitigate their effect on the poorest layers of the population. Unemployment level (in per cent) was less than in many developed countries of the world and, moreover, was declining, and so were population growth rates. What would be the grounds to expect a full-scale social explosion? Of course, the administration had a sort of reliable information on the presence of certain groups of dissident “bloggers”, but how could one expect that they would be able to inspire to go to the Tahrir any great masses of people? It was even more difficult to figure out that Mubarak’s regime would be painfully struck by its own modernization successes of the 1980s, which led to the sharp decline of crude death rate and especially of infant and child mortality in 1975–1990. Without these successes many young Egyptians vehemently demanding Mubarak’s resignation (or even death) would have been destined to die in early childhood and simply would not have survived to come out to the Tahrir Square.
Socio-economic development in the Arab world is an important element of global pattern changes in the early 21st century. They show a complex interaction of processes in the masses of the new young "Internet generations" and the elites, and somewhat forgotten gastarbiters. Matrix of kingdoms and republics, oil and non-oil countries make situation more complex for the region than for any separate country. From our viewpoint the political spring in the Arab world requires, first of all, the analysis of the Arab society, its nature and characteristics that distinguish it from societies of the Christian tradition of Europe and the Americas. And is it revolt of the middle class in one oil country or a rebellion of tribes? The new middle class, the information revolution and the dispossessed masses, including migrant workers in the background of the huge concentration of wealth of the ruling regimes represent the socio-economic reality of the Middle East that will be present in international politics in the next decade. And finally - to what extent the lesson of Lybia can be applicable to other oil countries? What may be lessons for other elites?
Corpus linguistics can be broadly defined in terms of two partially overlapping research dimensions . On the one hand, corpus linguistics is knowledge of how to compile and annotate linguistic corpora. On the other hand, corpus linguistics is a family of qualitative and quantitative methods of language study based on corpus data. The book presents the first steps taken by Russian corpus linguistics toward the development of language corpora and corpus-based resources as well as their use in grammatical and lexical analysis.
The first part of the book focuses on the annotation of Russian texts at several levels: lemmas, part of speech and inflectional forms, word formation, lexical-semantic classes, syntactic dependencies, semantic roles, frames, and lexical constructions. We discuss various theoretical principles and practical considerations motivating the corpus markup design, provide details on the creation of lexical resources (electronic dictionaries and databases) and text processing software, and consider complicated cases that present challenges for the annotation of corpora both manually and automatically. In most cases we describe the annotation of the Russian National Corpus (RNC, ruscorpora.ru) and its affiliate project FrameBank (framebank.ru).
Frequency data depend not only on the representativeness and balance of texts in a corpus, but also on the rules and tools used for annotation. The book addresses the development of evaluation standards for Russian NLP resources, namely, morphological taggers and dependency parsers. In addition, the book presents several experiments on automatic annotation and disambiguation: lemmatization of word forms not in the dic- tionary; word sense disambiguation based on vectors formed by lexical, semantic and grammatical cues of context; and semantic role labeling.
The final chapters of the first part of the book outline two types of frequency dictionaries based on the RNC data: a general-purpose frequency dictionary and a lexico-grammatical one.
The second part of the book presents an analysis of corpus data and includes a number of case studies of Russian grammar and lexical-grammatical interaction using quantitative methods. The key concept underlying our analysis is the behavioral profile (Hanks 1996; Divjak, Gries 2006), which is the frequency distribution of variable elements in a linguistic unit as attested in a corpus. This covers grammatical profiles (the frequency distribution of inflected forms of a word), constructional profiles (the frequency distri- bution of argument or any other constructions attested for a key predicate), lexical and semantic profiles (the frequency distribution of words and lexical-semantic classes in construction slots or, more generally, in the context of a word), and radial category profiles (the frequency distribution of word senses and word uses across the radial category network of a polysemous unit). We use grammatical, constructional, semantic, and radial category profiling to study tense, aspect and mood specialization of Russian verb forms; to identify singular-oriented and plural-oriented nouns; to investigate factors for prefix choice and prefix variation in natural perfectives (chistovidovye perfectivy); to analyze constraints on the filling of slots in a construction and how this affects the meaning of the construction, taking as an example the Genitive construction of shape and the spatial construction with the preposition poverkh ‘up and over’.
The quantitative corpus-based techniques used for the analysis vary from simple descriptive statistics (e. g., absolute frequencies, percentages, measures of the central ten- dency and outliers) to exact Fisher test and logistic regression. We claim that the vector modeling approaches to quantitative grammatical studies in theoretical linguistics are no less effective than in computational linguistics, where they have become a standard tool.
The December protests in Moscow do not represent a “Russian Spring,” “Orange Revolution,” or new version of Perestroika. Rather they have more in common with the Progressive movement that fought corruption in the U.S. during the early part of the twentieth century. The demonstrations made clear that Russian citizens now want to play an active role in their country’s political life.
How are professors paid? Can the "best and brightest" be attracted to the academic profession? With universities facing international competition, which countries compensate their academics best, and which ones lag behind? Paying the Professoriate examines these questions and provides key insights and recommendations into the current state of the academic profession worldwide. Paying the Professoriate is the first comparative analysis of global faculty salaries, remuneration, and terms of employment. Offering an in-depth international comparison of academic salaries in twenty-eight countries across public, private, research, and non-research universities, chapter authors shed light on the conditions and expectations that shape the modern academic profession. The top researchers on the academic profession worldwide analyze common themes, trends, and the impact of these matters on academic quality and research productivity. In a world where higher education capacity is a key driver of national innovation and prosperity, and nations seek to fast-track their economic growth through expansion of higher education systems, policy makers and administrators increasingly seek answers about what actions they should be taking. Paying the Professoriate provides a much needed resource, illuminating the key issues and offering recommendations
This article analyzes some important aspects of socioeconomic and political development of the world in the near future. The future always stems from the present. The first part of the article is devoted to the study of some crucial events of the present, which could be regarded as precursors of forthcoming fundamental changes. In particular, it is shown that the turbulent events of late 2010 and 2011 in the Arab World may well be regarded as a start of the global reconfiguration. The article also offers an analysis of some aspects of the global financial system that, according to the authors, notwithstanding all its negative points, performs certain important positive functions including the ‘insurance’ of social guaranties at the global scale. The second part of the article considers some global scenarios of the World System's new future and describes a few characteristics of the forthcoming ‘Epoch of New Coalitions’. The article attempts to answer the following questions: What are the implications of the economic weakening of the USA as the World System center? Will the future World System have a leader? Will it experience a global governance deficit? Will the world fragmentation increase?
The article deals with the processes of building the information society and security in the CIS in accordance with modern conditions. The main objective is to review existing mechanisms for the formation of a common information space in the Eurasian region, regarded as one of the essential aspects of international integration. The theoretical significance of the work is to determine the main controls of the regional information infrastructure, improved by the development of communication features in a rapid process.The practical component consists in determining the future policies of the region under consideration in building the information society. The study authors used historical-descriptive approach and factual analysis of events having to do with drawing the contours of today's global information society in the regional refraction.
The main result is the fact that the development of information and communication technologies, and network resources leads to increased threats of destabilization of the socio-political situation in view of the emergence of multiple centers that generate the ideological and psychological background. Keeping focused information policy can not be conceived without the collective participation of States in the first place, members of the group leaders of integration - Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Currently, only produced a comprehensive approach to security in the information field in the Eurasian region, but the events in the world, largely thanks to modern technology, make the search for an exit strategy with a much higher speed. The article contributes to the science of international relations, engaging in interdisciplinary thinking that is associated with a transition period in the development of society. A study of current conditions in their relation to the current socio-political patterns of the authors leads to conclusions about the need for cooperation with the network centers of power in the modern information environment, the formation of alternative models of networking, especially in innovation and scientific and technical areas of information policy, and expanding the integration of the field in this region on the information content.
This special publication for the 2012 New Delhi Summit is a collection of articles by government officials from BRICS countries, representatives of international organizations, businessmen and leading researchers.
The list of Russian contributors includes Sergei Lavrov, Foreign Minister of Russia, Maxim Medvedkov, Director of the Trade Negotiations Department of the Russian Ministry of Economic Development, Vladimir Dmitriev, Vnesheconombank Chairman, Alexander Bedritsky, advisor to the Russian President, VadimLukov, Ambassador-at-large of the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry, and representatives of the academic community.
The publication also features articles by the President of Kazakhstan NursultanNazarbayev and internationally respected economist Jim O’Neil, who coined the term “BRIC”. In his article Jim O’Neil speculates about the future of the BRICS countries and the institution as a whole.
The publication addresses important issues of the global agenda, the priorities of BRICS and the Indian Presidency, the policies and competitive advantages of the participants, as well as BRICS institutionalization, enhancing efficiency and accountability of the forum.