Working paper
Elections, Protest and Trust in Government: A Natural Experiment from Russia
The author considers the hypothesis that under certain circumstances mistrust acts as the driving force for political development whereas trust, especially in its essential paternalistic forms, preserves the unsatisfactory status quo. The problem analyses as a part of general trend in the contemporary world towards declining prestige of public institutions and taking into account the Russian specifics.
The article focuses on people who took part in opposition rallies during the winter 2011– 2012 in Moscow and on language that they used to create protest signs and slogans. Who were the protesters? Whom did they address? What were they going to say and how? The research is based on the database that includes more than 1500 slogans containing verbal or nonverbal protest signs from mass opposition rallies. The article also includes information on “authors” (people who held placards, their age, and gender proportion), describes the “frames” which they used with a reference either to a precedent text or a precedent case, and explores the occurrence of different frames. Slogans with quotes, frequency of citing the authorities or mass culture texts, and the usage of pun are considered. Finally, the addressees of slogans are described.
With the ubiquitous nature of modern technologies, they have been inevitably integrated into various facets of society. The connectivity presented by digital platforms has transformed such innovations into tools for political and social agendas.
Politics, Protest, and Empowerment in Digital Spaces is a comprehensive reference source for emerging scholarly perspectives on the use of new media technology to engage people in socially- and politically-oriented conversations and examines communication trends in these virtual environments. Highlighting relevant coverage across topics such as online free expression, political campaigning, and online blogging, this book is ideally designed for government officials, researchers, academics, graduate students, and practitioners interested in how new media is revolutionizing political and social communications.
In the article on the example of political performances art-group «23:59» from Yelets showing new possibilities of street protests in Russia. Attempting to review the overall political texts by «23:59» allows you to see the close connection with the protest political trend in modern Russia in winter 2011–2012, and also the obvious emphasis on literary sources. That is where art-group recommends looking for answers to pressing questions of the current political agenda.
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.
While workers movements have been largely phased out and considered out-dated in most parts of the world during the 1990s, the 21st century has seen a surge in new and unprecedented forms of strikes and workers organisations. The collection of essays in this book, spanning countries across global South and North, provides an account of strikes and working class resistance in the 21st century. Through original case studies, the book looks at the various shades of workers’ movements, analysing different forms of popular organisation as responses to new social and economic conditions, such as restructuring of work and new areas of investment.
The subject of this chapter is the ethical and sociological aspects of events during perestroika and after. At that time, Russia reached the zenith of liberal ethical values, of romantic hopes and expectations and public demands for justice and the accountability of public authorities. Unfortunately, substantial underestimation of the importance of non-economic factors—especially moral ones—in the reform process resulted in a moral crisis, general disappointment in liberalism and other substantive negative consequences. Acquisition of intellectual and political liberties coincided with a catastrophic economic crisis and the imposition of urgent and necessary measures that were very hard on the population. These measures saved the country from economic collapse but for high political cost, because they were associated (wrongly, as it happens) in mass consciousness with the liberal concept as such. The borders of tolerance toward material impoverishment for the benefit of political freedom were crossed. Also, the paradox of double, contradictory treatment of liberalism in both Soviet intellectual and bureaucratic circles is analyzed in this context. The continuity of former Soviet administrative personnel engendered moral anomy, an identity crisis and alienation among them because inherited officials proved to be unprepared both morally and professionally for work under conditions of transition from socialism to a marketoriented system. This promoted the growth of systemic corruption. The public trust toward the state and public officials have been broken. Moreover, public trust in democratic institutions in general and even a very belief in the possibility of honest government have been undermined then. Despite this, we can find in the contemporary situation a certain ground for optimism. This is based on the revival of demands for social justice and unwillingness to tolerate its absence any longer. Public political protest is considered in this context as a natural and positive element of social activity and political participation, and as a pre-condition for the existence of civil society. In addition, the revival of liberal values in such a form, intuitively sometimes, such as the evolution of horizontal connections and parallel structures in different areas of social life, efforts of people to become maximally independent from state bureaucracy, is the subject of final pages of the chapter.
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.