Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1177/2336825X20984340
Aliaksei Kazharski
The rigged 2020 presidential election in Belarus, as well as the disproportionate use of violence by authorities and multiple reports of tortures of detainees served as a catalyst for the Belarusian society. The mass protests that ensued were on a scale unseen since the 1990’s. Mass mobilization of citizens during Sunday rallies as well as grassroot activity and the rise of local communities led some to proclaim the birth of a new civic society and even a new Belarusian political nation (Przybylski, 2020). The ultimate validity of these statements can be fully evaluated only with the benefit of hindsight, which we do not have as of the time of writing. One can nevertheless safely argue that unprecedented mass political mobilization and new forms of horizontal solidarity are important contributions to nation building—which, in the social constructivist paradigm, should be understood as a never-ending process rather than a singular event. This line of thought has been previously developed by authors who understand nations and nation-states as performing their identities through various genres of cultural production (e.g. Shapiro, 2004). This contribution focuses on symbolic politics of the protest movement as ‘‘signifying practices’’ (Hall, 1997) and examines ways in which these practices reappropriate crucial symbolic legacies in order to articulate a new political subject through representations of an anti-Lukashenka majority. Following a discussion of the broader context of identity building in the post-Communist Belarus, I provide an empirical analysis of two key legacies recycled by the protests. The first one is the political legacy of Belarusian national revivalism and its symbols that quickly became the dominant visual theme in the protests. Though, in their origin, these symbols were closely linked to ethnocultural Belarusian nationalism, the protest movement has worked to resignify them into
{"title":"Belarus’ new political nation? 2020 anti-authoritarian protests as identity building","authors":"Aliaksei Kazharski","doi":"10.1177/2336825X20984340","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X20984340","url":null,"abstract":"The rigged 2020 presidential election in Belarus, as well as the disproportionate use of violence by authorities and multiple reports of tortures of detainees served as a catalyst for the Belarusian society. The mass protests that ensued were on a scale unseen since the 1990’s. Mass mobilization of citizens during Sunday rallies as well as grassroot activity and the rise of local communities led some to proclaim the birth of a new civic society and even a new Belarusian political nation (Przybylski, 2020). The ultimate validity of these statements can be fully evaluated only with the benefit of hindsight, which we do not have as of the time of writing. One can nevertheless safely argue that unprecedented mass political mobilization and new forms of horizontal solidarity are important contributions to nation building—which, in the social constructivist paradigm, should be understood as a never-ending process rather than a singular event. This line of thought has been previously developed by authors who understand nations and nation-states as performing their identities through various genres of cultural production (e.g. Shapiro, 2004). This contribution focuses on symbolic politics of the protest movement as ‘‘signifying practices’’ (Hall, 1997) and examines ways in which these practices reappropriate crucial symbolic legacies in order to articulate a new political subject through representations of an anti-Lukashenka majority. Following a discussion of the broader context of identity building in the post-Communist Belarus, I provide an empirical analysis of two key legacies recycled by the protests. The first one is the political legacy of Belarusian national revivalism and its symbols that quickly became the dominant visual theme in the protests. Though, in their origin, these symbols were closely linked to ethnocultural Belarusian nationalism, the protest movement has worked to resignify them into","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":"6 1","pages":"69 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83770551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1177/2336825x20983743
G. Mykhailiuk, Larry A. DiMatteo
The right to freedom of peaceful assembly is guaranteed by Article 39 of the Ukrainian Constitution. However, there is no stand-alone law or case law that defines, regulates and supports the process of organizing and conducting peaceful assemblies. This is largely due to the fact that until the 2014 Maidan Revolution (Euromaidan), Ukraine’s history was one of autocratic rule. This article argues that given this historical context, secondary legislation is needed to safeguard this freedom and entrench it into Ukrainian legal culture. The idea of the right to peaceful assembly is sacrosanct. This article analyses the key elements needed to transform this idea into an ideal law. For example, any such legislation should follow the spirit of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), especially in the area of limitations of the personal freedom. Ukraine has moved forward on a broad reform agenda including reforms of the judiciary in order to create an independent and competent court system. It is widely recognized that such a system is needed to fight widespread corruption. The article argues that now is the time to enact a law on peaceful assembly in order to elevate Ukraine’s legal system to EU and international standards.
{"title":"Creating a comprehensive peaceful assembly law for Ukraine: Idea and ideal","authors":"G. Mykhailiuk, Larry A. DiMatteo","doi":"10.1177/2336825x20983743","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825x20983743","url":null,"abstract":"The right to freedom of peaceful assembly is guaranteed by Article 39 of the Ukrainian Constitution. However, there is no stand-alone law or case law that defines, regulates and supports the process of organizing and conducting peaceful assemblies. This is largely due to the fact that until the 2014 Maidan Revolution (Euromaidan), Ukraine’s history was one of autocratic rule. This article argues that given this historical context, secondary legislation is needed to safeguard this freedom and entrench it into Ukrainian legal culture. The idea of the right to peaceful assembly is sacrosanct. This article analyses the key elements needed to transform this idea into an ideal law. For example, any such legislation should follow the spirit of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), especially in the area of limitations of the personal freedom. Ukraine has moved forward on a broad reform agenda including reforms of the judiciary in order to create an independent and competent court system. It is widely recognized that such a system is needed to fight widespread corruption. The article argues that now is the time to enact a law on peaceful assembly in order to elevate Ukraine’s legal system to EU and international standards.","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":"80 1","pages":"45 - 68"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78963717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1177/2336825X20984331
Piotr Rudkouski
In 2020, we have witnessed unprecedented mass mobilization of Belarusians against autocracy and lawlessness. The durability of protests, scale of solidarity, ability of self-organization, and readiness to accept serious risks seem to testify to the fact that the demand for democracy is rooted in the value sphere. There is, however, a distinctly Belarusian problem in this context, relating to national identity. In this forum contribution, I will first specify the problem of Belarusian national identity and provide evidence of its weakness. Second, I will argue that Belarusians tend to compensate for the weakness of their national identity by reinforcing a supranational identity. The ‘Russian World’ (Russkiy mir) currently fulfils this function. Third, I will show that Belarusians are relatively eurosceptic, and suggest that this is a byproduct of attachment to Russianness as a substitute for national identity.
{"title":"Russia’s cultural leverage in Belarus","authors":"Piotr Rudkouski","doi":"10.1177/2336825X20984331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X20984331","url":null,"abstract":"In 2020, we have witnessed unprecedented mass mobilization of Belarusians against autocracy and lawlessness. The durability of protests, scale of solidarity, ability of self-organization, and readiness to accept serious risks seem to testify to the fact that the demand for democracy is rooted in the value sphere. There is, however, a distinctly Belarusian problem in this context, relating to national identity. In this forum contribution, I will first specify the problem of Belarusian national identity and provide evidence of its weakness. Second, I will argue that Belarusians tend to compensate for the weakness of their national identity by reinforcing a supranational identity. The ‘Russian World’ (Russkiy mir) currently fulfils this function. Third, I will show that Belarusians are relatively eurosceptic, and suggest that this is a byproduct of attachment to Russianness as a substitute for national identity.","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":"124 1","pages":"102 - 108"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88052644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1177/2336825X20984337
Alla Leukavets
It is sometimes claimed that during his 26 years of rule Lukashenka has acted as a guarantor of Belarusian sovereignty (Preiherman, 2018; Tsikhamirau, 2018). According to this point of view, as long as Lukashenka stays in power, Russia will not be able to fully control Belarus. This paper will argue that although during Lukashenka’s time in office Belarus has avoided deeper integration with Russia within the Union State, the Belarusian regime has failed to reduce the country’s economic dependence on its eastern neighbor. This provided the Kremlin with leverage to control Belarus, compromising its sovereignty. The extent of the leverage became particularly evident in the wake of the 2020 presidential elections when the survival of the Belarusian regime proved to be contingent on Russia’s support. The Kremlin’s generous economic assistance over the last 26 years has created a “sponsored authoritarianism” in Belarus. Lukashenka’s role in it is to ensure that the country will not leave the orbit of Russia’s influence and drift to the West while the Kremlin attempts to realize a soft mode of occupation of Belarus via deep economic and political integration under the auspices of unified supranational bodies. The paper starts by analyzing different phases in Belarus-Russia relations in 2000–2020 and argues that the recent presidential elections in Belarus have become a new critical juncture. The work proceeds with assessing the extent of Russia’s economic leverage over Belarus in 2000–2020 by focusing on three main components: 1) Belarus-Russia bilateral trade 2) Belarus’s energy dependence on Russia 3) Russia’s financial support to Belarus. The paper demonstrates that by the time of the 2020 presidential elections none of these components have been reduced, thus making the Belarusian regime vulnerable to Kremlin’s pressure. The work concludes by discussing the trajectory of Belarus’s future regardless of whether Lukashenka stays in power or leaves office and argues that the Belarusian protests represent both a challenge and an opportunity for the Kremlin.
{"title":"Russia’s game in Belarus: 2020 presidential elections as a checkmate for Lukashenka?","authors":"Alla Leukavets","doi":"10.1177/2336825X20984337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X20984337","url":null,"abstract":"It is sometimes claimed that during his 26 years of rule Lukashenka has acted as a guarantor of Belarusian sovereignty (Preiherman, 2018; Tsikhamirau, 2018). According to this point of view, as long as Lukashenka stays in power, Russia will not be able to fully control Belarus. This paper will argue that although during Lukashenka’s time in office Belarus has avoided deeper integration with Russia within the Union State, the Belarusian regime has failed to reduce the country’s economic dependence on its eastern neighbor. This provided the Kremlin with leverage to control Belarus, compromising its sovereignty. The extent of the leverage became particularly evident in the wake of the 2020 presidential elections when the survival of the Belarusian regime proved to be contingent on Russia’s support. The Kremlin’s generous economic assistance over the last 26 years has created a “sponsored authoritarianism” in Belarus. Lukashenka’s role in it is to ensure that the country will not leave the orbit of Russia’s influence and drift to the West while the Kremlin attempts to realize a soft mode of occupation of Belarus via deep economic and political integration under the auspices of unified supranational bodies. The paper starts by analyzing different phases in Belarus-Russia relations in 2000–2020 and argues that the recent presidential elections in Belarus have become a new critical juncture. The work proceeds with assessing the extent of Russia’s economic leverage over Belarus in 2000–2020 by focusing on three main components: 1) Belarus-Russia bilateral trade 2) Belarus’s energy dependence on Russia 3) Russia’s financial support to Belarus. The paper demonstrates that by the time of the 2020 presidential elections none of these components have been reduced, thus making the Belarusian regime vulnerable to Kremlin’s pressure. The work concludes by discussing the trajectory of Belarus’s future regardless of whether Lukashenka stays in power or leaves office and argues that the Belarusian protests represent both a challenge and an opportunity for the Kremlin.","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":"42 1","pages":"90 - 101"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82424025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1177/2336825X20984336
A. Makarychev
This essay attempts to juxtapose mass-scale protest movements that almost simultaneously erupted in summer 2020 in Belarus and Russia’s Far East. In spite of dissimilar root causes of both events, they however share a number of common characteristics, such as spontaneity, lack of wellestablished leadership, networking/horizontal structure (Paneyakh, 2020) and explicitly nonideological character. What made the symbolic connection between the two post-Soviet ‘‘hot spots’’ even more politically pronounced were explicit and unprecedented signs of solidarity expressed by protesters in Khabarovsk with the anti-Lukashenka movement. Since we can see some emerging similarities in these two cases, let us try to understand what they are, why did they emerge, and how they can be conceptualized theoretically. The protests that have been unfolding in parallel to each other in Minsk (as well as other major cities of Belarus) and Khabarovsk were driven by obviously different reasons and could have remained detached from each other. The outburst of street activity in Belarus was triggered by the fraudulent presidential election, while in Khabarovsk people went to streets as a reaction to the sudden arrest of the region’s governor by the order of the federal center. For Belarus the protests constituted a basis for national anti-authoritarian consolidation, while the anti-Moscow actions in the Far East are regarded as potentially conducive to Russia’s decentralization (Luchikhin, 2020). However, the appearance of slogans of solidarity with Belarus among protesters in Khabarovsk has created a symbolic connection between the two events (Sibir’ Realii, 2020), which looked quite unique since never before had the Russian opposition expressed any well-articulated sympathy with democratic movements in other post-Soviet countries. For example, Alexei Navalny’s attitude towards Ukrainian national discourse on retrieving the annexed Crimea was always quite
{"title":"The Minsk–Khabarovsk nexus: Ethical, performative, corporeal","authors":"A. Makarychev","doi":"10.1177/2336825X20984336","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X20984336","url":null,"abstract":"This essay attempts to juxtapose mass-scale protest movements that almost simultaneously erupted in summer 2020 in Belarus and Russia’s Far East. In spite of dissimilar root causes of both events, they however share a number of common characteristics, such as spontaneity, lack of wellestablished leadership, networking/horizontal structure (Paneyakh, 2020) and explicitly nonideological character. What made the symbolic connection between the two post-Soviet ‘‘hot spots’’ even more politically pronounced were explicit and unprecedented signs of solidarity expressed by protesters in Khabarovsk with the anti-Lukashenka movement. Since we can see some emerging similarities in these two cases, let us try to understand what they are, why did they emerge, and how they can be conceptualized theoretically. The protests that have been unfolding in parallel to each other in Minsk (as well as other major cities of Belarus) and Khabarovsk were driven by obviously different reasons and could have remained detached from each other. The outburst of street activity in Belarus was triggered by the fraudulent presidential election, while in Khabarovsk people went to streets as a reaction to the sudden arrest of the region’s governor by the order of the federal center. For Belarus the protests constituted a basis for national anti-authoritarian consolidation, while the anti-Moscow actions in the Far East are regarded as potentially conducive to Russia’s decentralization (Luchikhin, 2020). However, the appearance of slogans of solidarity with Belarus among protesters in Khabarovsk has created a symbolic connection between the two events (Sibir’ Realii, 2020), which looked quite unique since never before had the Russian opposition expressed any well-articulated sympathy with democratic movements in other post-Soviet countries. For example, Alexei Navalny’s attitude towards Ukrainian national discourse on retrieving the annexed Crimea was always quite","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":"136 1","pages":"109 - 119"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87744663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1177/2336825X20984334
Elizaveta Gaufman
Those familiar with Soviet posters might have seen the heart-wrenching ‘‘Red Army soldier, save!’’ artwork from the Great Patriotic War that features a woman holding her child huddled in fear of the bayonet with the Nazi insignia on it. The damsel in distress trope is not unique to the Post-Soviet space: iconography of any political turmoil in the world would offer one. But what happens when the damsel is in distress but she does not need a male to rescue her? Or even more so, when she is actively fighting against the male in power? Does she have to bare her chest as the Liberty on the French barricades or wield a sword like the statue in Volgograd? This is the iconographic challenge that the protests in Belarus were faced with: apart from the confrontation between a large part of the population against an authoritarian leader, the conflict had also clear gendered lines: a leader striving to project hypermasculinity (at least, at the beginning) versus a female-led protest. How does this gender divide translate into the visual iconography of the protest? Belarus is clearly a part of the Post-Soviet cultural space (although Belarusians might take issues with their current President saying that they are Russia’s ‘‘younger brother’’) and the protest iconography is deeply imbued with the Soviet and Russian cultural artifacts. This also makes Belarusian population more receptive to other Soviet representations of women: not just damsels in distress, but armed Motherlands, muscular female Kolkhoz members and voluptuous sportswomen. At the same time, as Reid argues (Reid, 1998), even the portrayal of strong women in visual Soviet culture put them in a slightly subordinate role, where in the seemingly equal tandem of Factory worker and Kolkhoz member statue by Mukhina, the factory worker had a higher and more important position in the Soviet society, not to mention the perceived femininity of food-related occupation. Thus, even the purportedly emancipated and gender-equal Soviet society still managed to promote patriarchal values through cinema and art (Gorsuch, 1996; Haynes, 2003).
{"title":"The gendered iconography of the Belarus protest","authors":"Elizaveta Gaufman","doi":"10.1177/2336825X20984334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X20984334","url":null,"abstract":"Those familiar with Soviet posters might have seen the heart-wrenching ‘‘Red Army soldier, save!’’ artwork from the Great Patriotic War that features a woman holding her child huddled in fear of the bayonet with the Nazi insignia on it. The damsel in distress trope is not unique to the Post-Soviet space: iconography of any political turmoil in the world would offer one. But what happens when the damsel is in distress but she does not need a male to rescue her? Or even more so, when she is actively fighting against the male in power? Does she have to bare her chest as the Liberty on the French barricades or wield a sword like the statue in Volgograd? This is the iconographic challenge that the protests in Belarus were faced with: apart from the confrontation between a large part of the population against an authoritarian leader, the conflict had also clear gendered lines: a leader striving to project hypermasculinity (at least, at the beginning) versus a female-led protest. How does this gender divide translate into the visual iconography of the protest? Belarus is clearly a part of the Post-Soviet cultural space (although Belarusians might take issues with their current President saying that they are Russia’s ‘‘younger brother’’) and the protest iconography is deeply imbued with the Soviet and Russian cultural artifacts. This also makes Belarusian population more receptive to other Soviet representations of women: not just damsels in distress, but armed Motherlands, muscular female Kolkhoz members and voluptuous sportswomen. At the same time, as Reid argues (Reid, 1998), even the portrayal of strong women in visual Soviet culture put them in a slightly subordinate role, where in the seemingly equal tandem of Factory worker and Kolkhoz member statue by Mukhina, the factory worker had a higher and more important position in the Soviet society, not to mention the perceived femininity of food-related occupation. Thus, even the purportedly emancipated and gender-equal Soviet society still managed to promote patriarchal values through cinema and art (Gorsuch, 1996; Haynes, 2003).","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":"1 1","pages":"80 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88624002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1177/2336825X20972896
Nicholas Michelsen
{"title":"New Perspectives across viral time: Russia in the World","authors":"Nicholas Michelsen","doi":"10.1177/2336825X20972896","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X20972896","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":"116 1","pages":"431 - 434"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79587344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-09-16DOI: 10.1177/2336825X20954758
S. Afontsev, I. Kobrinskaya, G. Machavariany, A. Zagorski, V. Zhuravleva, I. Zviagelskaya, K. Voda, N. Kozhanov, A. Davydov, O. Davydov, S. Dmitriev, A. Lomanov, S. Lukonin, D. Malysheva, V. Mikheev, N. Rabotiazhev, I. Svistunova, I. Ibragimov, S. Kislitsin, E. Solovyev, E. Kuzmina, N. Surkov, N. Toganova, S. Utkin, A. Fedorovsky, B. Frumkin, V. Shvydko, YE Kanaev, L. Samarskaya
The editors had to make significant adjustments to this abridged version of IMEMO’s annual ‘Russia and the World’ forecast published in early January 2020. However, none of the numerous forecasts published until March 2020 had been anywhere close to considering, among the potential ‘black swan’ factors, the global scenario caused by COVID-19. No one had anticipated the scale of the pandemic and its consequences for the world economy and trade, including the fall in oil prices and the reaction of financial markets.
{"title":"Russia and the world: 2020 IMEMO forecast","authors":"S. Afontsev, I. Kobrinskaya, G. Machavariany, A. Zagorski, V. Zhuravleva, I. Zviagelskaya, K. Voda, N. Kozhanov, A. Davydov, O. Davydov, S. Dmitriev, A. Lomanov, S. Lukonin, D. Malysheva, V. Mikheev, N. Rabotiazhev, I. Svistunova, I. Ibragimov, S. Kislitsin, E. Solovyev, E. Kuzmina, N. Surkov, N. Toganova, S. Utkin, A. Fedorovsky, B. Frumkin, V. Shvydko, YE Kanaev, L. Samarskaya","doi":"10.1177/2336825X20954758","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X20954758","url":null,"abstract":"The editors had to make significant adjustments to this abridged version of IMEMO’s annual ‘Russia and the World’ forecast published in early January 2020. However, none of the numerous forecasts published until March 2020 had been anywhere close to considering, among the potential ‘black swan’ factors, the global scenario caused by COVID-19. No one had anticipated the scale of the pandemic and its consequences for the world economy and trade, including the fall in oil prices and the reaction of financial markets.","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":"56 1","pages":"435 - 461"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89821353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-09-15DOI: 10.1177/2336825X20954442
R. Sakwa
The annual reports published by Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO) on Russia and the state of world affairs act like the rings on a tree, measuring changes over time by offering a snapshot of a particular instant. This report is no different but comes at a time that could scarcely be more unlike earlier years. The Covid-19 pandemic has acted like a savage beam of light, illuminating processes that were apparent yet not fully revealed. The pandemic has also intensified many of these processes, accentuating what had already been observed to be ‘the great acceleration’, the speeding up of historical processes in recent years. Drawing on the analysis presented in the IMEMO report, this comment identifies three key interrelated issues that are now subject to accelerated change: first, the broader retreat of the post-1945 ‘Yalta’ international system established at the end of the Second World War, focused above all on the United Nations (UN); second, the decay of the post-1989 settlement, which turned out not to be a settlement in any meaningful sense; and third, the return of a certain type of great power relations in the Covid era. The emergence of the rudiments of bipolarity signals the onset of a new era of confrontation, with few of the guardrails of the First Cold War and none of the clear ideological markers of the earlier era, rendering this period more dangerous than that of the post-war conflict and more akin to the period leading up to the First World War.
{"title":"The new era of confrontation: Russia and the World: 2020 IMEMO Forecast","authors":"R. Sakwa","doi":"10.1177/2336825X20954442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X20954442","url":null,"abstract":"The annual reports published by Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO) on Russia and the state of world affairs act like the rings on a tree, measuring changes over time by offering a snapshot of a particular instant. This report is no different but comes at a time that could scarcely be more unlike earlier years. The Covid-19 pandemic has acted like a savage beam of light, illuminating processes that were apparent yet not fully revealed. The pandemic has also intensified many of these processes, accentuating what had already been observed to be ‘the great acceleration’, the speeding up of historical processes in recent years. Drawing on the analysis presented in the IMEMO report, this comment identifies three key interrelated issues that are now subject to accelerated change: first, the broader retreat of the post-1945 ‘Yalta’ international system established at the end of the Second World War, focused above all on the United Nations (UN); second, the decay of the post-1989 settlement, which turned out not to be a settlement in any meaningful sense; and third, the return of a certain type of great power relations in the Covid era. The emergence of the rudiments of bipolarity signals the onset of a new era of confrontation, with few of the guardrails of the First Cold War and none of the clear ideological markers of the earlier era, rendering this period more dangerous than that of the post-war conflict and more akin to the period leading up to the First World War.","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":"36 1","pages":"495 - 502"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79374005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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