Search results for ""Author Samuel Greene""

This special issue deals with the phenomenon of violence in the post-Soviet space. The central preoccupation is to examine both political and legal discourses and practices of internal and external violence, broadly conceived, in this space. Simultaneously the special issue aspires to situate these discourses and practices in the broader literature on political violence and ethnic and separatist conflict, and to examine these from political, legal, and security studies perspectives. The issue approaches the problem of violence in the post-Soviet space from three perspectives: The international-structural, inter-state, and domestic-political. The contributors focus on structural sources of violence: The relevance of the self-determination principle, the role of democratisation, and the relationship between violent behaviour inside and outside the state. They also analyse the role of the Russian Federation in generating, perpetuating, and mitigating political violence. Finally, they adopt a bottom-up approach, exploring how non-state actors contribute to political violence.

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The Russian war in Ukraine has been accompanied, fuelled and legitimized by a Russian information war campaign that is unprecedented in its scope and nature. Increasingly lurid in form, sometimes surreal, the Russian state-media propaganda campaign has been surprisingly successful in disguising and distorting the nature of the war and shaping the way it is perceived and understood, both in Russia and beyond.This special issue sets out to launch an interdisciplinary discussion on the Russian information warfare being waged in parallel with the military war in Ukraine. How is the war being packaged and narrated for domestic and international audiences? How are these narratives being received in Russia and in the West? How do we interpret and explain the imperial hysteria and hatred currently on display on Russian TV? What are the appropriate responses? How can we avoid the trap of allowing Kremlin propagandists to shape the terms and language in which the war is viewed? The JOURNAL OF SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET POLITICS AND SOCIETY is a new bi-annual journal about to be launched as a companion journal to the Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society book series (founded 2004 and edited by Andreas Umland, Dr. phil., Ph. D.). Like the book series, the journal will provide an interdisciplinary forum for new original research on the Soviet and post-Soviet world. The journal aims to become known for publishing creative, intelligent and lively writing tackling and illuminating significant issues and capable of engaging wider educated audiences beyond the academy.

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The special issue offers an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the questions of agency of less mainstream groups in protest movements in patriarchal and authoritarian societies. The themes covered include the place of feminist and gender equality movements in democratically restricted environments, intersections between feminism and nationalism and citizenship, possibilities of right-wing feminism and pop-feminism, the role of gender in high politics and the relationship between nationality and sexuality in the context of protest movements. The journal features contributions by scholars, human rights and gender equality activists, and journalists, and facilitates a constructive and wide-ranging discussion of the recent and ongoing protest movements in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.

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This special issue provides a forum for discussion of what Belarusian Studies are today and which new approaches and questions are needed to revitalize the field in the regional and international academic arena. The major aim of the issue is to go beyond the narratives of dictatorship and authoritarianism as well as that of a never-ending story of failed Belarusian nationalism -- interpretive schemes that are frequently used for understanding Belarus in scholarly literature in Western Europe and Northern America. Bringing together ongoing research based on original empirical material from Belarusian history, politics, and society, this issue combines a discussion of the concept of autonomy/agency with its applicability to trace how individual and collective actors who define themselves as Belarusian -- or otherwise -- have manifested their agendas in various practices in spite of and in reaction to state pressure. This issue offers new approaches for interpreting Belarusian society as a dynamically changing set of agencies. In doing so, it attempts to overcome a tradition of locating present Belarusian political and social dilemmas in its socialist past.

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