Book chapter
The Interaction Between ICT and Authoritarian Legitimation Strategies: An Empirical Inquiry
Legitimacy is a vital source of stability in authoritarian political systems, and non-democracies are developing various tools to sustain it. The Internet is said to be one such tool, offering a variety of legitimizing effects, but the main discussion in this paper is around the referent object and the type of legitimation. This study attempts to explore how the diffusion of online tools is associated with different legitimation strategies of authoritarian countries, as measured by the Varieties of Democracy project. The analysis suggests that IT – tools diffusion is strongly and positively correlated with the rational-legal and performance types of legitimation. While the data is subject to variation, the results support an earlier claim that the proliferation of online tools is legitimation-driven and is applied to specific forms of legitimacy. This initial analysis will be further developed by including legitimation strategies into the causal Internet diffusion models.
In book
In the coming decades in the process of globalization the position of the USA and Europe will weaken, while the role of developing countries will increase. The role of the two largest emerging economies – China and India – will be of special significance. What future will these fast-growing giants face? The demographers agree that pretty soon India will lead the world in population and thus surpass China, while China will encounter serious population ageing. But economic and political scenarios of the future are quite different: from resounding success and world leadership to collapse caused by demographic and socio-political troubles. Which of them is more feasible? In the present article I analyze the Chinese and Indian development models separately and comparatively and make prognosis of their perspectives in the twenty-first century. Such an analysis could be helpful for understanding Russia's ways of development.
In this article the author attempts to explain the events occurring in the country taking into account the specificity of the Ukrainian political culture. From the point of view of the author, a key player in the Ukrainian revolution in 2014 was the Ukrainian society itself, and any attempt to comment the situation of modern Ukraine, first of all, should take into account civil conditions of the society itself. Qualitative state of civil society in Ukraine outrun the quality of the ruling elite, which inevitably provokes new confrontations and conflicts.
In the 1990s, sub-national authoritarian regimes – local-based monopolies of ruling elites – emerged in many of Russia’s regions and cities against the background of spontaneous decentralization of government and competitive electoral politics. In the 2000s, the decline of political competition and recentralization of the Russian state led to incorporation of sub-national authoritarian regimes under federal control and cooptation of local-based actors into the dominant party, United Russia. This paper is devoted to a comparative analysis of sub-national authoritarianism in Russia in light of the experience of local political machines in other countries, ranging from US cities from the 1870s-1930s to Southern Italy from the 1950s-1980s. Unlike the American political machines, which were demolished from below as a by-product of modernization processes, Russia’s sub-national authoritarian regimes were integrated from above into the nation-wide authoritarianism. One might expect further stagnation of sub-national authoritarian regimes in Russia until major regime changes will occur on the national level.
The number of conflicts in the world is increasing, as well as their intensity and fierceness. We see the trend of unfolding spiral of violence in the world and thus there is a pressing need to assess the underlying reasons of it. Challenges to a secure development of the world stem from political, economic and social issues that have long been ignored or have not been effectively dealt with by both policymakers and researchers. Likewise, both academic and policy responses to the unfolding global grievances and local ferocities are still one-sided in many cases, which causes ever more fighting and insurgence. This project aims to fill in existing lacunas in the area of understanding issues underlying the current global conflict trend, many of which have long been in the shadow of research and policy-analysis internationally. This book project sheds light on complicated and long-term issues, such as revival of authoritarianism, crucial transformation of peacekeeping concept, rising security and strategic issues of small states, as well as security challenges presented by\to new international grouping such as BRICS. An intentionally diverse scope of this project allows to bring along such issues as Islamophobia and the prospects for Christian-Muslim dialogue, the scope, essence and consequences of international sanctions to manage international disputes, as well as the issue of a failed state. The geographical scope of this project ranges from North Korea to Somalia, and from Russia to Brazil. This project aims to educate all interested in the underlying fundamental long-term reasons of current political conflicts worldwide and to provoke debate on many issues that are still considered “second priority level”, though they provide even stronger basis for the current conflict-prone situation in the world. This book project aims to satisfy the need of in-depth analysis and expertise on issues of international sanctions, revival of authoritarianism, failure of state, formation of new international organizations, changing essence of peacekeeping in conflict-prone areas and globally, new contexts for Muslim-Christian dialogue and it successes and failures, as well as lesser-known contexts of strategic choices of small states.
The authors: Francesco Giumelli, Mitchell Belfer, Hanna Shelest, Piskunova Natalia, Gracian Cimek, Yefimova Anna, Bekkin Renat, Solkin Victor, Sarah Rial, Esther Sule.
Various forms of dictatorship have been a context in which SBS have been developing through most of the 20th century. Nazi and fascist regimes in Europe, Communist single-party states, military juntas in Latin America and elsewhere in the post-colonial world accompanied the crisis of tradition and development of modernity as an alternative to liberal democracy. Dictatorships have thoroughly affected the history of SBS pursuing a policy of repression and control and, sometimes, encouraging a growth of various social science disciplines. The lack of intellectual and institutional autonomy is generally endured, though to different degrees and in different aspects, by SBS under dictatorship.