Search results for ""Author Taras Kuzio""

Post-communist democratic revolutions have, so far, taken place in six countries: Slovakia (1998), Croatia (1999-2000), Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004) and Kyrgyzstan (2005). The seven chapters in this volume situate these events within a theoretical and comparative perspective. The volume draws upon extensive experience and field research conducted by political scientists specialising in comparative democratisation, regime politics, political transitions, electoral studies, and the post-communist world. The papers by Valerie Bunce and Sharon Wolchik, Henry Hale, Paul D'Anieri, David R Marples, Taras Kuzio, Lucan A Way and Steven Levitsky, as well as Anika Locke Binnendijk and Ivan Marovic explore different regime types and opposition strategies in post-communist states, the diffusion of opposition strategies between states in which democratic revolutions were attempted, the strategic importance of youth NGO's in mobilising oppositions towards democratic revolutions, the use of non-violent strategies by the opposition, path dependent, theoretical and comparative explanations of the sources of successful and failed democratic revolutions, and the factors that lie behind divergent post-revolutionary trajectories. The volume represents a breakthrough in our understanding of why and how democratic revolutions take place in the post-communist world. It provides an integrated analysis of why such upheavals succeed in some, but fail in other states. The contributions point to, among other issues, why the post-revolutionary breakthroughs in Serbia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan have encountered obstacles, the ousted regime was never fully defeated and its representatives were able to launch counter-revolutions, as well as why, in Serbia and Ukraine, the political forces of the ousted regimes have returned to power in free elections held after democratic revolutions. Post-Communist Democratic Revolutions in Comparative Perspective will be important reading for scholars and policy makers alike.

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The Crimea was the only region of Ukraine in the 1990s where separatism arose and inter-ethnic conflict potentially could have taken place between the Ukrainian central government, ethnic Russians in the Crimea, and Crimean Tatars. Such a conflict would have inevitably drawn in Russia and Turkey. Russia had large numbers of troops in the Crimea within the former Soviet Black Sea Fleet. Ukraine also was a nuclear military power until 1996.This book analyses two inter-related issues. Firstly, it answers the question why Ukraine-Crimea-Russia traditionally have been a triangle of conflict over a region that Ukraine, Tatars and Russia have historically claimed. Secondly, it explains why inter-ethnic violence was averted in Ukraine despite Crimea possessing many of the ingredients that existed for Ukraine to follow in the footsteps of inter-ethnic strife in its former Soviet neighbourhood in Moldova (Trans-Dniestr), Azerbaijan (Nagorno Karabakh), Georgia (Abkhazia, South Ossetia), and Russia (Chechnya).

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Ukraine's 2004 presidential election was falsified, spurring the Orange Revolution. To many observers, the Orange Revolution was a shock, and the stolen elections a recent development. However, both the election fraud and the effort to topple the government of Leonid Kuchma emerged from political dynamics that had appeared in earlier Ukrainian elections. In this path breaking volume, leading scholars place Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution in the longer perspective of Ukraine's post-Soviet electoral politics. Covering both presidential and parliamentary elections over the entire post-Soviet period, the chapters clarify the manner in which earlier elections had emerged as part of the battle for power in Ukraine well before 2004. The opposition that came to power in 2004 had also won the 2002 elections and had developed its strategies during opposition protests that had been catalysed by the Kuchmagate crisis in 2000. The evolution of the dynamics that led to the fraudulent 2004 election reveals that the events of 2004 represented continuity as well as change. By placing the 2004 elections within a longer trajectory, the volume enriches our understanding of the Orange Revolution and helps us to understand the difficulties faced in consolidating Ukraine's democratic breakthrough following the Orange Revolution. The volume contains an introduction to Aspects of the Orange Revolution I-VI by Andreas Umland followed by eight chapters by Robert K. Christensen, Edward R. Rakhimkulov and Charles Wise, Paul D'Anieri, Robert Kravchuk and Victor Chudowsky, Paul Kubicek, Taras Kuzio, Lucan Way, and Anna Makhorkina. These authors bring complex and varied perspectives that situate Ukraine's post-Soviet elections in economic reforms, constitutional law, foreign policy objectives of integrating into Europe, as well as in the broader context of the rough and tumble competition for political control of Ukraine.

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This book details how Russia's February 2022 open invasion of Ukraine has led to the biggest military conflagration and refugee crisis in Europe since World War II-a development with global ramifications. Co-written by a leading Western political expert, with three decades of research on contemporary Ukraine, and a prolific British journalist, the book explains why Russian President Vladimir Putin has been long obsessed with Ukraine and how his reliance on dated nationalist myths as well as anti-Western xenophobia led him to miscalculate Ukrainian and Western reactions to his brazen aggression against a sovereign country and founding member of the United Nations since 1945. Taras Kuzio and Stefan Jajecznyk-Kelman analyze how Putin's blunders have led to the collapse of Russia's Eurasian sphere of influence, to the growth of China's presence in Russia's backyard in Central Asia, and to conditions for the toppling of Putin's regime.The book focuses on:- the roots of Putin's obsession with Ukraine and the genocidal policies his army is pursuing through war crimes, deportations of millions of Ukrainians as well as destruction of property and infrastructure,- why the supposed 'second biggest army in the world' is being defeated by Ukraine, a country Russian nationalists argue is fictitious, and by a Ukrainian people they claim does not exist,- how Ukraine is fighting a people's war with a nation-wide volunteer movement, civil society, and international supporters who are backing the Ukrainian army through fund raising, purchasing of supplies and military equipment, such as drones, and through an 'IT Army' fighting Russia's invasion in cyber space and the hacking of Russian media,- how the invasion is having profound negative implications for Russian-Ukrainian relations and why in breaking from Moscow, Ukraine is again the key actor-as it was in 1991-in the disintegration of the Soviet and Russian empires, and- how Russia's invasion of Ukraine has led to global crises in economic growth, trade, and finances, as well as to changing geopolitical alliances, with the decline of Russia creating a vacuum that allows for the rise of China.

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Western academics, experts, and journalists specializing in Eastern Europe and Eurasia have grappled with two fundamental analytical crises in connection with the 1991 disintegration of the USSR and Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Both crises were brought about by similar lack of understanding by scholars, think tank experts, and journalists of Moscow's relations with its neighbors. Typically, they were characterized by a downplaying of the historic and current role of Russian great power nationalism.The book's contributors investigate how the Kremlin's recent turbo-charging of Russia's information warfare, 24-hour TV, and social media activity has expanded on traditional pro-Russian sentiments among Western academics, experts, and journalists. The authors analyze the downplaying of Russian nationalism, misinterpretations of the 2014 crisis, sympathetic portrayals of Crimea's occupation, and the use of the term "civil war" rather than "Russian-Ukrainian war" for the Donbas conflict in academia as well as the think tank world and media in the UK, Germany, Poland, Japan, The United States, and Canada.The list of contributors includes: Olga Bertelsen (Tiffin University, Ohio), Paul D'Anieri (University of California at Riverside), Andrew Foxall (Henry Jackson Society, London), Andreas Heinemann-Grüder (University of Bonn), Shanshiro Hosaka (University of Tartu), Petro Kuzyk (Lviv National University), Michal Wawrzonek (Jesuit University Ignatianum, Krakow), Andrei Znamenski (University of Memphis, Tennessee), and Sergei Zhuk (Ball State University, Indiana).

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