Nikolai Yu. Silaev

A certain theoretical perplexity has emerged in studies of post-Soviet polities. The concept of neopatrimonialism has proved, on the one hand, too capacious, and, on the other, insufficiently flexible to account for the variety of political orders that have emerged across the former Soviet space. The informality paradigm has yielded a number of fruitful observations, yet it has not produced a persuasive body of theoretical generalizations. Both approaches took shape in polemics with the theory of democratic transition; nevertheless, both retained from it a pronounced normative inclination, whereby the polity underexamination is assessed according to its distance from an assumed liberal-democratic “norm”. One possible way to overcome this theoretical uncertainty lies in the relatively recently coined concept of “limited” or “incomplete” statehood. This concept denotes a polity in which the state is only capable of fulfilling its functions to a limited extent. Unlike the theory of neopatrimonialism, the category of limited statehood does not impose a rigid and normative categorization, and unlike the informality paradigm, it does not neglect the study of formal institutions. Rather, it directs attention to the interaction of the formal and the informal within a given political order. The present study of social ties within the higher bureaucracy of Tajikistan demonstrates the analytical fruitfulness of the “limited statehood” approach. Social ties are operationalized as the experience of joint service among officials over the course of their careers and are represented as a network graph comprising 252 nodes and 1,180 edges. The analysis shows that cliques - isolated groups organized around a clearly dominant leader and commonly associated with patron-client relations - are virtually absent from the network. By contrast, professional communities are clearly discernable, with their members linked to particular branches of public administration. The patterns of career advancement among officials in the most influential state agencies point less to appointments based on personal loyalty or kinship than to the existence of a career bureaucracy. The persistence of such a technocratic state apparatus may, in turn, be explained by the specific character of the rent extracted by Tajikistan's ruling elite.

Network analysis was employed to investigate ownership and management connections among Ukraine’s 995 top taxpayers as of late 2021, with the objective of empirically evaluating the presence and coherence of “oligarchic” clusters immediately preceding the onset of the Special Military Operation. The analysis is based upon a publicly accessible registry of firms, which provided data on company names, regions of registration, directors, ultimate owners, revenues, profits, assets, and liabilities. From these data, a person-to-person graph was constructed in which nodes corresponded to individual actors (directors or owners) and edges denoted shared ties through asset control or executive functions. Cluster analysis techniques were subsequently applied to identify statistically significant communities of actors linked by common economic interests. The results indicate that, by the end of 2021, Ukraine did not exhibit “oligarchs” as individuals controlling a large share of national wealth and exercising substantial political influence. Instead, most high-revenue entrepreneurs maintained relatively limited portfolios of enterprises, and the few actors who might be classified as oligarchs pursued divergent business and political strategies that failed to fit into a single pattern. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions in the literature on post-socialist political regimes, which often presume the existence of stable and homogeneous “oligarchic” conglomerates. Consequently, informal elite structures in Ukraine appear to have been more fragmented than commonly portrayed. Although the concept of “oligarchy” retains analytic value for examining state-business relations within post-socialist contexts of a certain epoch, the present analysis underscores the necessity of adopting a more nuanced, data-driven perspective on elite configuration. It also calls for a critical reevaluation of assumptions regarding the persistence and immutability of post-Soviet political-economic orders.

Russia’s cautious and moderate policy in Transcaucasia is based on the principle that it is better to get on well with the neighbors by recognizing their right to own opinion and interests, while upholding one’s own. Russia had to use force against the Kiev regime, but it refuses to consider this the norm.

If negotiations take place and yield a result, a credible threat to Kiev must remain constantly present, as the history of Russian-Ukrainian relations knows no other way to force Ukraine to honor its commitments—hence Russia’s demand for Ukraine’s demilitarization.

Over the past decade, Russia has experienced a notable decline in the incidence of terrorist attacks, coinciding with the Russian government’s pursuit of socio-economic development in the North Caucasus region, which has historically been a focal point for such attacks. This paper uses Granger tests to determine whether government economic policies have played a role in reducing terrorist activity in three North Caucasus republics: Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria. The results of this analysis reveal a direct causal relationship between budgetary expenditure on the national economy and the frequency of terrorist attacks, with higher expenditure correlating with an increase in attacks in two out of the three republics, namely Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkaria. In contrast, public investment in human capital, as operationalized by spending on education and health, is shown to contribute to a decrease in terrorism in one of the three republics, namely Kabardino-Balkaria.

«Россия – серьезный игрок в гонке ИИ»

«Россия – серьезный игрок в гонке ИИ»

Практическая многополярность: как Индия выигрывает от украинского кризиса

Практическая многополярность: как Индия выигрывает от украинского кризиса

Russia’s policy towards the Ukraine crisis has been deeply consistent, although diplomatic instruments gave way to military ones in 2022 Considerations of potential future negotiations should take this consistency into account.