post-Soviet Context Research Articles

In the Land of Giants: Eco-Mythology and Islamic Authority in the Post-Soviet Tatar Imagination

At the turn of the twenty-first century, giants occupied the imagination of occultists, neopagans, and nationalist writers. This article explores why those mythical colossi, a product of the pre-modern imagination, folklore, and childhood fantasy are still relevant to modern Tatars. More specifically, it centers on Fäüziyä Bäyrämova, whose fiction stands prominently in environmental public-school curricula. This inquiry provides a literary genealogy of Tatar eco-mythology, while nuancing the previous assumption in literary studies that in its evolution, the gigantic has moved away from enchantment to secularization. Unlike medieval Anglo-Saxon giants who embodied the sins of humanity or represented the uncivilized “other,” Soviet giants were builders and guardians of Tatars’ Islamic sacred geography, threatened by urbanization and secularization. In Bäyrämova's reinterpretation, they reappear not only as guardians of a nationalist cartography, but also as transmitters of Islamic reform and orthopraxy. In both Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, giants emerge as conduits of religious authority.

Fervent Christians: Orthodox activists in Russia as publics and counterpublics

ABSTRACT In the post-Soviet context liberal publics in Russia often see the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate as a satellite of the state and its collaborator. Attempts by Church representatives, sometimes self-appointed, to enlarge the Church’s presence in public space are perceived by secular publics as violating certain principles fundamental to the functioning of the public sphere: individual membership and independence from the state. Consequently, individual religious activists and associations of believers – Orthodox brotherhoods and sisterhoods, charity projects and other initiatives affiliated with the Church – function as counterpublics which feel excluded from the common public sphere and form alternative public spheres. This contribution focuses on the public actions of a female religious activist in a big city in the Urals who presents herself as speaking on behalf of the church people, often aiming to establish or defend visible religious symbols in the city landscape.

Bridging the gap: special educators’ perceptions of their professional roles in supporting inclusive education in Kazakhstan

As Kazakhstan joins the worldwide movement towards inclusive education, many students with special educational needs and disability in Kazakhstan continue to be educated in segregated settings. The role of key stakeholders such as special educators (defectologists), are important in the process of educational reform, and their attitudes may support or hinder the progress. Six special educators were voluntarily recruited to participate in one-on-one interviews in this case study research, concerning their perceptions about their role within current inclusive education reforms. The participants in this study perceived their role as solely teaching students with special educational needs and disabilities within the main specialization of a special educator. However, special educators in Kazakhstan understand disability as a dialectical concept, where biological and social factors are intertwined. Thus, their understanding of the importance of removing environmental and broader societal attitudinal barriers for individuals with special needs may present a valuable resource for change. Points of interest This article concerns the educational reforms in inclusive education in the Republic of Kazakhstan, in Central Asia. Special educators known as defectologists play a significant role in supporting the educational needs of students with disability. The way that special educators understand disability influences their attitudes and practices. It will have bearing on the support they provide, the way they view their responsibilities as professionals, as well as the professional opinions that they share with their colleagues, the child’s parents, and other stakeholders. The profession of defectology in the Soviet and post-Soviet context may be misunderstood by Western researchers. Researchers in inclusive education may avoid or overlook the field of ‘defectology’ because it appears to adopt a deficit approach and be heavily medicalised. Until widespread changes are made into adopting new terminology in this field, future research into special education in Kazakhstan, may overlook the influence of special educators as key stakeholders. Researchers should be encouraged to see beyond the terminology to look deeper into the attitudes and practices of special educators in the Kazakhstani and Central Asian context.

Multiplicative or compensatory advantage? Multigenerational contribution to grandchildren’s educational success in the Soviet and the post-Soviet contexts

ABSTRACT Drawing on retrospective data from the Estonian Family and Fertility Survey, this article examines the impact of grandfathers, who reached adulthood in the Estonian Republic before World War II, on their grandchildren’s educational attainment in the late Soviet and post-Soviet Estonia. The article argues that despite the Sovietization policies, the high social position of grandfathers had a positive effect on their grandchildren’s educational attainment, net of parental education and resources. Our results show that the multiplication effect (i.e. the advantage of having highly educated parents is strengthened by grandparents’ resources) prevails over the compensatory one (i.e. the use of advantageous grandparents’ resources to overcome shortage of parental resources), suggesting that social hierarchies and advantages of the pre-Soviet period contribute to the overall and increasing intergenerational inequality in the late Soviet and post-Soviet Estonian society. This conclusion is also supported by finding that respondents with persistently high (across two familial generations and political regimes) social background have the highest probability to attain higher education, while offspring of parents characterized by the loss of grandparents’ high pre-WWII status has very low (and practically non-different from that of descendants of persistently low social background) probability to attain higher education.

Muslim Women’s Narratives of Veiling and Identity in Post-Soviet Contexts

Abstract Based on ethnographic materials, the article discusses Muslim women’s narratives as an expression of the process of identity negotiation in the post-Soviet cultural context. Muslim women’s narratives based on Islamic, ethnic, gendered epistemologies are intertwined with each other and hybrid. Muslim-Tatar women’s identity as women, Muslims and Tatars is tied together, while simultaneously being fragmented and peripheral to male identity. Since the Russian state imbues veiling with political meaning, Muslim women identity is politicized, therefore veiling as a part of Muslim-Tatar women’s identity is negotiated not only inside of the Muslim-Tatar community, but outside due to external discourses.

Gender and the navigation of STEM careers in higher education institutions: Narratives of female faculty in post-Soviet Tajikistan

ABSTRACT The underrepresentation of female faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines is a globally acknowledged gender equity concern; however, it remains under-researched in post-Soviet contexts. Using a theoretically informed analysis, this paper explores how female STEM faculty members navigate their gender identities in domestic and academic spheres in post-Soviet Tajikistan. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 21 female faculty members. The results indicated that parental discourses and family circumstances enabled female faculty members to defy the gendered oppositional inscription of STEM, while the performance of non-hegemonic masculinities by spouses, male mentors, and academic supervisors supported their career advancement. However, the gendered micropolitics of higher education institutions significantly undermined the performance of female STEM faculty members’ identity and subjected them to discrimination, marginalisation, and isolation.

The Pearl of Muğam Philosophy: Qəzəl Poetry and Musical Hermeneutics in Independent Azerbaijan

Abstract The 650th anniversary of Azerbaijan's beloved poet Imadaddin Nasimi (1369–1417) in 2019 was marked by two compositions in which his famous qəzəl “Sığmazam” was set to music. Qəzəl poetry is usually performed in muğam, a branch of traditional Azerbaijani music, and its unorthodox use by pop stars in these two compositions sparked intense debates. In this article, I discuss how the deep significance and instrumentality that qəzəl poetry holds in the post-Soviet context explains the powerful impact of the two pieces. I show how interpretation and imagination of qəzəl meanings in muğam, especially the theme of the beyond, is a way to make social and political realities and articulate post-Soviet subjectivities that emerge through the narrative of loss and in relation to beliefs about the Soviet past.

From the Editor

From the Editor

Emerging from the shadow of the Soviet Union: the case of the accountancy field in Latvia

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the structure of the accounting field in a post-Soviet context – Latvia. This study also aims to generate insights into the extent to which professionalization processes are shaped by national particularities and to demonstrate how self-styled professional fields change over time.Design/methodology/approachDrawing from the relational sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and drawing on 83 interviews, the paper highlights the forms of capital (cultural and social primarily) that help define what constitutes appropriate conduct for successful career progression in the accounting field.FindingsThe values ascribed to forms of capital that structure the Latvian accounting field fluctuate across time and space. This suggests that the structure of professional fields – as understood by the structuring properties of different forms of capital – is variable and fluid. Additionally, fields themselves can become more or less desirable over time to those who possess certain forms of capital.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough the results may be specific to one national accounting field, the idiosyncrasies constitute the contribution of the paper, showing that the form and structure of accounting fields vary in accordance with national particularities. Overall, the paper highlights the importance of fit between habitus and field and of adjustment to the surrounding rules of the game in professional contexts.Originality/valueThe findings are important for understanding the form that an accounting field can take in an emerging economy that has fully embraced neoliberalism while maintaining strong residues of the Soviet system. The findings are also relevant for understanding the dynamics of change more broadly in self-styled professional fields.

Outer space techno-politics and postcolonial modernity in Kazakhstan

This article examines the role of outer space technopolitics in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. It explores how outer space, the technological artefact of global relevance, works as a postcolonial fetish of modernity that is called upon to produce what it represents, that is, the reality of a technologically advanced Kazakh nation. The article shows that in its project of becoming a spacefaring nation the country reiterates major incentives that have motivated nuclear and space programme development in the postcolonial context of the Global South. It explores how collaboration with Russia allows Kazakhstan to claim its share in the Soviet space legacy rather than to distance itself from it. The study then traces the rise of a new internationalism in the Kazakhstani space programme outside the post-Soviet context. The article contributes to the debate on postcolonial technopolitics and shows how outer space has been used to enhance the conventional domain of postcolonial national ideologies – nativism and tradition – with technology and science. Finally, it depicts how the growing resistance to the space programme among Kazakh civil society groups reveals a close association of the environmental agenda with an ‘eco-nationalism’ permeated by a profoundly anti-imperial and, ultimately, anti-authoritarian political discourse.

Obscene language and the renegotiation of gender roles in post-Soviet contexts

Abstract Mat is a specific domain of Russian obscene vocabulary including words related to sexuality. The first sociolinguistic studies on mat emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union, concomitantly with the formation of Russian gender studies in the early 1990s (Tëmkina & Zdravomyslova 2003: 51). Until today, research on gender and taboo in Russian has been exiguous. Many scholars claim that the use of mat is a male prerogative (Uspenskiĭ 1994: 56, Doleschal & Schmid 2001: 274), whereas women’s use of mat is heavily sanctioned in society. Through data from a survey I carried out with 772 participants, I illustrate that mat is strongly present in women’s language use and that stereotypical gender conceptualizations are undergoing change. From the participants’ answers it emerges that discussions about the use of obscene language play a critical role in the multifaceted process of renegotiation of gender roles in post-Soviet contexts.

OUR CONTRIBUTION TO FUNDAMENTAL SOCIAL AND LEGAL SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHES

The relevance of this study stems from the fact that, in the post-Soviet context, due attention is still not paid to the development patterns of Russian society. This situation, in the final analysis, has an impact on the overall well-being of our country. Therefore, the article, using the social science method, justifies the proposal to put Russian society on the path of natural legal patterns of human development. The purpose and result of our study is not only to substantiate the call to intensify studies of a natural and legal nature, fully corresponding to the modern period of social development, but also to rethink many of the laws rooted in national theoretical legal science concerning the emergence, functioning and development of national state and law. From this point of view, it seems to us that a just society must first be created, so that it can in turn create (establish) a state appropriate to its nature. The article is about how to achieve this, what needs to be done to create such a society and state.

In This Issue

The two-part roundtable Constructing Race and Architecture 1400–1800 consists of brief “think pieces” that examine issues related to the intersection of race and architecture from around the globe during the period 1400–1800. The first part of the roundtable appeared in the September 2021 issue of JSAH, and Part 2 appears in this issue, featuring contributions by Rachel A. A. Engmann, Laura Fernández-González, Mark Hinchman, Dana E. Katz, Khaled Malas, Peter Minosh, Garth Myers, Jason Nguyen, Ikem Stanley Okoye, Senam Okudzeto, and, Ünver Rüstem.Through a reconstruction of the murky process involved in the design of the Hajj Terminal at the King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Matthew Allen examines how computational expertise negotiated a new role for itself within the hierarchy of late twentieth-century corporate architecture. In The Genius of Bureaucracy: SOM’s Hajj Terminal and Geiger Berger Associates’ Form-Finding Software he explores how Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s rubric of “the architecture of genius and the architecture of bureaucracy” played out in a situation where the two ideals converged. Unusual among other large corporate firms, SOM not only invested in computation early on but also leveraged computer-generated images to promote its practice. Examination of SOM’s printouts from the Hajj Terminal project reveals the pervasive presence of the lower ranks of the corporate hierarchy—particularly the engineering subconsultants Geiger Berger Associates, who developed unique software for engineering tensile structures. In this contest between decisive SOM designers such as Gordon Bunshaft and Fazlur Khan and engineering paperwork, a new understanding of “the computer” emerged that congealed around the concept of form-finding, or “smart” digital modeling.In the early 1960s, amid affluence, loneliness, and increasing longevity, a new type of community appeared in the United States: the “active-retirement complex,” with thousands of houses and/or apartments and an unprecedented range of communal facilities. Though such communities were instantly popular, skeptics likened the first examples to internment camps, and to deflect such critiques, developers like Ross Cortese began to prioritize design. In Retirement Planning: Charles Warren Callister, the Neighborhood Unit, and the Architecture of Community at Rossmoor and Heritage Village, Matthew Gordon Lasner describes how Cortese hired acclaimed San Francisco Bay Area architect Charles Warren Callister, known for his innovative private and ecclesiastical commissions, to design a new retirement community known as Rossmoor, located in the East Bay suburb of Walnut Creek. Long interested in housing reform, Callister attempted to serve the needs of seniors, especially their needs for community and activity, by employing a village plan and arranging the housing in “neighborhoods” around clustered courtyards, both at Rossmoor and at a later project, Heritage Village in Connecticut. Lasner’s study examines the experiences of residents of Callister’s complexes to determine whether this approach, which was rooted in theory rather than gerontological research, “worked” as intended.Transforming the Architecture of Food: From the Soviet to the Post-Soviet Apartment focuses on the changes to urban domestic architecture and food-related spaces—those for eating, cooking, and storage—that occurred parallel to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this article, Kateryna Malaia traces a path from standardized Soviet apartment housing built and regulated by the state to the implementation of architectural and spatial solutions by individual apartment dwellers and designers in the post-Soviet years. From the 1980s through the early 2000s, such remodeling projects affected late- and post-Soviet architectural imagination and urban apartments en masse, coinciding with ephemeral yet important changes in domestic practices. To navigate these complex transformations, Malaia questions traditional architectural programmatic labeling—kitchen, dining room, family room, open plan—within the late- and post-Soviet context. Drawing on both archival and popular sources as well as interviews with apartment dwellers, architects, and engineers collected in the post-Soviet urban centers of Kyiv and Lviv in Ukraine, this study shows how the grassroots adaptation of standardized apartment housing at this time echoed new economic and political circumstances. Malaia’s analysis of changes in food-related spaces and practices provides a critical index of the widespread social impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union in everyday architecture and life.

Transforming the Architecture of Food

Abstract Transforming the Architecture of Food: From the Soviet to the Post-Soviet Apartment focuses on the changes to urban domestic architecture and food-related spaces—those for eating, cooking, and storage—that occurred parallel to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this article, Kateryna Malaia traces a path from standardized Soviet apartment housing built and regulated by the state to the implementation of architectural and spatial solutions by individual apartment dwellers and designers in the post-Soviet years. From the 1980s through the early 2000s, such remodeling projects affected late- and post-Soviet architectural imagination and urban apartments en masse, coinciding with ephemeral yet important changes in domestic practices. To navigate these complex transformations, Malaia questions traditional architectural programmatic labeling—kitchen, dining room, family room, open plan—within the late- and post-Soviet context. Drawing on both archival and popular sources as well as interviews with apartment dwellers, architects, and engineers collected in the post-Soviet urban centers of Kyiv and Lviv in Ukraine, this study shows how the grassroots adaptation of standardized apartment housing at this time echoed new economic and political circumstances. Malaia’s analysis of changes in food-related spaces and practices provides a critical index of the widespread social impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union in everyday architecture and life.

Politicized Demography and Biomedical Authority in Post-Soviet Russia

ABSTRACT We explore obstetrician-gynecologists’ (ob-gyns’) shifting involvement in late Soviet and post-Soviet reproductive politics and track broader political-economic dynamics of the profession’s ambivalent relations with state demographic discourses. Soviet ob-gyns largely distanced themselves from explicitly pronatalist agendas. Post-soviet national politics of ‘population renewal’ and the neoliberalization of health care have significantly restructured ob-gyns’ orientations. To assert their authority and gain economic footing, ob-gyns have highlighted their contributions to the state’s demographic agendas. The post-Soviet context illustrates how understanding the medicalization of population problems requires examining the political-economic relations between physicians and the state – dynamics that can transform ideologies and medical practices.

NGOs and Neocolonialism in Postcolonial Literature: The Case of Central Asia

NGOs and neocolonialism are among the key concerns of postcolonial theorists, but their representation in postcolonial literature has received surprisingly little attention. This article examines the representation of NGOs and their impact on “developing” societies in postcolonial literature, specifically in two post-Soviet Russophone novels – Kazakhstani author Lilya Kalaus’s The Fund of Last Hope: A Post-Colonial Novel (2013) and Tajik author Eleonora Kasymova’s Tajik (2007). My analysis bridges research in literary studies and social sciences by complementing studies “from above” of the post-Soviet transition, and is intended to reveal how postcolonial societies, especially women, adopt, adapt, or resist the norms promoted by their countries’ NGOs. I argue that rather than taking a side or remaining passive objects in the power games of their nations, women writers use their personal insights into the workings of post-Soviet NGOs to expose the neocolonial tendencies in the agendas of each political player. Echoing Achille Mbembe’s notion of “mockery from within”, the authors satirise how local NGOs’ dependency on the West, and their inability to divorce themselves from Soviet influences, lead to their self-orientalising, contradictory and inefficient practices. Moreover, they reveal the complicity between foreign neocolonial forces, local corrupt elites and their subjects. Thus, Kalaus and Kasymova blur the oppressor/oppressed binaries and problematise the stereotypical anti-western critiques of NGOs in their countries. Furthermore, they point to the specificities of the Soviet colonial project and how its legacies are played out in the post-Soviet context. Much as the competing interests from Russia and the West, Soviet legacies, especially internalised Soviet Orientalism, exacerbate class divisions among women and lead to the depoliticisation of gender activism. By focusing on the understudied post-Soviet cultures through a postcolonial lens, the article widens our understanding of global neocolonial processes and their representation in literature more broadly.

Nuclear supply chain and environmental justice struggles in Soviet and Post-Soviet countries

ABSTRACT This article addresses and contributes to the discussion on nuclear supply chain socio-environmental conflicts in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts by bringing it together with nuclear peripheralization and environmental justice approaches. Descriptive statistics and qualitative coding were applied to 14 cases identified in the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice. Visible protests were first detected in 1976. The cases analysed comprise the whole nuclear supply chain; uranium mining bans, stopping nuclear reactors, and nuclear testing bans. Seven of the conflictive projects have been suspended by neighbours, citizens and communities, women, industrial workers, and Indigenous groups. However, nuclear projects remain of ongoing concern related to nuclear waste and potential nuclear accidents. Military violence intrinsic to nuclear power domination encounters anti-nuclear resistance in areas where nuclear socio-environmental legacies and current injustices are lived.

Moving through the STEM Pipeline: A Systematic Literature Review of the Gender Inequality in Russian Engineering

Gender inequality in engineering—and other scientific and technical fields—is one of the most persistent and intractable problems in modern culture. This issue has been sufficiently explored in Western Europe and the United States, but much less is known about the situation in Russia, which has a distinct gender history. In the former USSR, women were massively educated in technical sciences and their employment in engineering professions remained unconventionally high in comparison to the West. At the same time, women’s earnings were lower than men’s, and they mostly occupied low- and middle-level jobs, rarely reaching leadership positions. What happened to the gender imbalance after the collapse of the Soviet Union? How has it changed after radical political, economic, and social transformations? The purpose of this review, by analyzing empirical studies of gender inequality in engineering in post-Soviet Russia published after 1991, is to answer these questions. In the last 15 years, there has been a growing interest and works dedicated to this topic, but they remain fragmented and disconnected. Thus, there is a need for a generalized comparison of existing studies and the linking of them to one another. This systematic and problem-oriented literature review seeks to fill this gap. First, it aims to summarize, classify, and critically analyze the existing research results, thereby forming a general picture of gender transformations that have taken place in the engineering profession in Russia. Second, the review identifies key topics, issues, approaches, and reveals contradictions and gaps in the scientific discussion that enables a characterization of gender studies in the engineering field in Russia and formulates an agenda for future research. The review follows a STEM pipeline metaphor, organizing empirical findings in three stages: general education, professional education, and employment. Responding to the need for a comprehensive analytical perspective on gender inequality, the paper develops a multilevel framework, embracing and linking macro-, meso-, and individual-level causal factors of gender imbalance in engineering. The main finding is that gender inequality dramatically increases from an individual’s educational years to employment later in life, resulting in a multidimensional gender gap and multiple disadvantages for women. Path dependency on Soviet times has both positive and negative influences on gender equality, while the transition to a market economy has had mostly negative consequences, driving women out of engineering and leading to its masculinization. Another finding is that existing studies of the gender gap in post-Soviet Russia are not balanced, concentrating mostly on engineering education and initial professional socialization. More studies of the employment and workplace period are necessary, as it remains the most troublesome for women. In addition to women-oriented comparative studies, the role of men’s clubs, and norms of masculinity that support gender inequality need to be examined. More attention to macro-level factors and, most especially, the unique features of post-Soviet context is required. Acknowledgements. The research was funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) according to the project № 20-011-00690: “Engineering career in contemporary Russia: professional, organizational, and institutional transformations”.

Contributors

Previous articleNext article FreeContributorsFull TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLaura K. Nelson is assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. She uses computational methods to study social movements, gender, culture, and institutions, and has published in outlets such as Sociological Methods and Research, Mobilization, Poetics, and Gender and Society.Yang Zhang is assistant professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C., and a sociologist of history, politics, culture, and knowledge. He is currently finishing a book entitled Empire and Its Enemies: Religion, Ethnicity, and Rebellions in Mid-19th-Century China.Laura Hamilton is professor and chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Merced, where she researches the organizational production of inequality in higher education. Her books include Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities (with Kelly Nielsen) and Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College Women’s Success. She is cofounder (with Charlie Eaton) of the Higher Education Race and the Economy (HERE) Lab, which is currently working on projects addressing the unequal racial and class distribution of resources and risk in higher education.Elizabeth A. Armstrong is Sherry B. Ortner Collegiate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. She is the coauthor, with Laura T. Hamilton, of Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2013). She and a team of collaborators at the University of Michigan are in the midst of a project investigating university responses to sexual misconduct.Sarah Ashwin is professor of industrial relations in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics. She has a longstanding research interest in Russia’s stalled gender revolution, which she interrogates to develop different aspects of gender theory.Katherine Keenan is a lecturer (assistant professor) at the University of St Andrews, United Kingdom. Her work focuses on inequalities in population health and wellbeing across the life course. She has conducted mixed method research in Post-Soviet contexts for over a decade.Irina M. Kozina is professor of sociology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University) Moscow. Her research interests include labor markets, industrial relations, gender, and qualitative methodology.Ellis P. Monk Jr. is associate professor of sociology at Harvard University. His research interests include ethnoracial categorization and inequality in comparative perspective, the social determinants of health, sociology of the body, and social psychology. Currently he is continuing his research on skin tone stratification across multiple domains—such as health, the criminal justice system, and so on—and further developing his research on bodily capital. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and Social Problems, among other publications.Michael Esposito is assistant professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. His primary research interests include population health demography; racial and ethnic disparities in well-being; and statistical methodology for the social sciences.Hedwig (Hedy) Lee is professor of sociology and codirector of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity at Washington University in St. Louis. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 127, Number 1July 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/715716 Views: 1202 © 2021 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Promise and Perils of Urban Land Restitution in Latvia

ABSTRACT∞ In this article we address the transitional justice policy of restitution in kind with a case study of urban land reform in Latvia. Contributing to scholarship on the challenge of property reforms after generations of dispossession, we examine the economic, social and political meanings of property restitution in this post-Soviet context. Using process-tracing techniques to examine the creation and implementation of Latvia’s policy in the aftermath of independence from the Soviet Union, we illustrate specific challenges of restitution in kind where property changed through the construction of new buildings occupied by tenants. Financial disputes between landowners and tenants map on to ethnic and political divisions in Latvia, and a policy once seen as a remedy is now in need of a remedy.