State Strategies of Resisting Social Accountability

Abstract

This article contributes to growing research about the emergence of the rule of law, or horizontal accountability, still a salient difference between Western institutionalized democracies and the new democracies in post-communist Eurasia. Recent research has theorized “social accountability” as a possible mechanism linking public campaigning by civic associations with the activation of institutions of horizontal accountability. By reviewing the recent public campaigns of various associations in post-Soviet Ukraine, this article “turns the lens” of such research by focusing less on the characteristics of the civil society actors mobilizing to bring about accountability and more on the state itself. It argues that the prospects for horizontal accountability have to be judged against a wide range of containment measures that states attempt in order to demobilize public opposition to their policies. Such measures operate through “twisted legality,” a set of measures policing protests through means that are largely legal but specifically target protesters in ways that could not function were state powers indeed separated (for instance, if the police apparatus were to operate on the basis of legal mandates issued by independent courts). Furthermore, the goal of policing actions is to push protesters “out of legality,” in ways that I describe below.