Post-socialist State Research Articles

The making of a racialized surplus population

Abstract In capitalist Eastern Europe, surplus population is created at the intersection of economic restructuring, leading to the decline of jobs, the absorption of housing in broader circuits of capital accumulation, and the state's disinvestment in social housing. Drawing on the lived experiences of the impoverished Roma from Baia Mare (Maramureș county, Romania), I analyze how racialization produces them as surplus-as-laborer and surplus-as-tenant. The article explores the historically constituted labor-housing nexus. Capitalist enterprises are interested in having permanent access to a cheap and flexible labor force that reproduces in housing conditions that are as low cost as they are inadequate. Private real estate capital excludes those who cannot afford the fast-rising level of the ground rent while the post-socialist state refuses to invest in public housing.

Culture Wars as Property Struggles: The Hungarian Academy of Arts in Post-1989 Hungary

Abstract While property is a common analytical category in political economy, it is often omitted from cultural analysis. To bridge this gap, this article examines the Orbán regime’s cultural flagship institution, the Magyar Művészeti Akadémia [Hungarian Academy of Arts, HAA] from a property perspective. By putting the 1992‒2011 trajectory of the Academy under a spotlight, a rarely examined prehistory of the current Orbán regime comes to the fore. By deploying historical and social sciences literature alongside archival and interview-based primary research, it is here argued that the property perspective can transcend the “culture wars” explanations of postsocialist cultural polarization by highlighting the material roots of such conflicts. The case of the HAA serves to demonstrate that its cultural clashes were property struggles to obtain properties from the postsocialist state. In this quest, the Academy formed an uneven alliance with the national-protectionist elite bloc. By demonstrating how the HAA was bound to the competition of postsocialist elite blocs, its cyclical politicization can be best understood from the angle of the rapidly transforming property regime in post-1989 Hungary. In conclusion, the article proposes the postsocialist property regime of culture as a framework to analyze cultural and property clashes in tandem.

Layered Logic

Organizations instantiate multiple institutional logics, which operate in a nested fashion across levels of analysis. A demand on organizations in the Global South from aid donors is to adopt new management systems. Management systems like kaizen, a Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement, have an inherent logic. Kaizen’s adoption in Ethiopia, a postsocialist state, can be rendered ceremonial if its logic is not fully instantiated along with prevailing logics within recipient organizations. Our examination of the Ethiopian Sugar Corporation is an application of Besharov and Smith’s 2014 framework. We assume there is a high degree of centrality in this state-owned enterprise, because any managerial logic absorbed would have to adhere to the state logic. We conducted interviews, supplemented by archival data review, to illustrate what actors do to improve compatibility with state logic. Our findings suggest three institutional logics were instantiated, in order: the macro logic of developmental authoritarianism; micro logics of production order and social control; and the meso logic of knowledge brokerage. We propose the concept of layered logic, or ordering of institutional logics, each serving a distinct purpose yet fitted with the others.

Activist Journalists and Postsocialist Politics Through the Lens of the Armenian Velvet Revolution

This article draws on a cross-disciplinary framework to analyse the 2018 ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Armenia and its success in implementing regime change through grassroots resistance. Utilising interview data, we suggest that the success of the Armenian revolution—that is, the relative postrevolutionary democratisation—can be partially explained by the combination of the global trend towards the digitisation of political discourse with the active political role played by the local ‘activist journalists’ within the context of a postsocialist state.

The "pervasive" state: entrepreneurial identities, frustration, and gratitude.

The state has taken center stage during the COVID-19 pandemic in unanticipated ways. Rescuing private companies with public money exemplifies this, highlighting substantial state interventionism amidst a fairly dominant discourse of our times: that of the "neoliberal state." In this article, we focus on how owners of micro-businesses in Croatia constructed state practices during the COVID-19 pandemic and how interactions with the state prior to the pandemic contributed to these constructions. We reflect on the state as a historically embedded social relation that is understood, experienced, and felt. Drawing on interviews, we develop three themes that illustrate the layered and wrought relationship between business owners and the state, as they understand it to "exist"-state-mediated constructions of business owners: tycoons and heroes; frustrating state practices; contradictory images-the benevolent state. The pervasiveness of the state is reflected in how the post-socialist state has shaped professional identities in the business sector, in the overwhelmingly negative emotional landscape state practices seem to propel, but also in hints of state benevolence during the COVID-19 pandemic. The identified nexus of emotions in relation to state practices-exasperation, disappointment, indignation, gratitude-and their historical embeddedness are a strong indication of how present-day constructions of the state are an expression of "accumulated history." Based on their experiences with state practices, our interlocutors construct the state as corrupt, incompetent, inefficient, uncaring, coercive, only on occasion benevolent, and in a highly affective register as "unnecessary," while also expressing a desire for a state that "cares," particularly in disaster settings.

The formal, the temporal and the modern A historical view on the unfnished urban transformation of the city of Prishtina

Following Walter Benjamin’s thinking of “the modern” – which is an important theoretical contribution to the study of form – one could understand that the term designates both a formal temporal structure and the diverse range of its historical instances, past and present, whose reinterpretation and critical reading can stimulate possible future scenarios for urban spaces, or the understanding of specific developments related to them. For Benjamin’s theory to be applicable in the discipline of architecture, particular knowledge and methods are required, through which unfold the processes of modernity in relation to the temporal and formal phenomenon. Thus, the aim of this essay is to re-read Benjamin’s modernity within the discussion on temporality, by using architectural form and language as tools. Temporality and modernity are widely discussed topics of scientific research, particularly linked to the tradition of the Frankfurt School. However, we are interested in deciphering these two topics through a historical category, as an object through which the scientific architectural research is crafted. And in order to connect this category to a practical level contextualized within an urban setting, this essay studies the urbanization of modernist cities, the historical events impacting it, and the stages of modernity, focusing on the city of Prishtina in Kosovo. Prishtina is used as a case-study on account of its particular history in the course of the twentieth and twenty-first century. It is the capital city of a post-socialist state that experienced a radical shift in ideological and political systems, characterized by a complex architectural and urban form with distinguished modern features. This paper will study the unfinished modernism in Prishtina (1945-ongoing), – interrupted by politico-ideological instances – which led to a fragmentation of the urban form and the presence of multiple urban realities. In so doing, this paper will decipher specific events from different time periods, to be defined as critical junctures of Prishtina’s modern history, which had a particular outcome in architecture and its urban setting. The study of the temporal and the formal in modern architecture and city planning will focus on two plans: 1) The political and economic context in Prishtina, within former Yugoslavia, which produces an ideological condition within which architecture becomes ideological; 2) The discipline of architecture, which impacts the form and aesthetics of buildings and cities through modern ideology and normativities.

Childhood in urban China: A three-generation portrait

This article examines how the experience of childhood has changed in urban China against the backdrop of the wider political, social and economic transformations in the 20th century. Drawing on 95 life history interviews in three urban sites in China, it explores the nature, origins and impact of continuities and changes in childhood experiences across three generations. While expressive intimacy between the only-child generation and their parents increased, the three-generational comparison disputes previous theorizing about the modernization of childhood and the value of children based upon a Euro-American empirical reality. Rather than being trapped in a linear progression model, this article reveals that while the economic value of children as family helpers has dramatically reduced across three generations, the economic prospect of children as old age security goes hand in hand with the emotional value of children, which is shaped by the cultural tradition of filial piety, social welfare context and demographic structure. As a consequence, in contrast with the existing argument of an individualization of childhood in China, this article indicates that the youngest generation – the only-child generation – experienced an increasing regimentalization of childhood, exercised by their parents and driven by both neoliberal market and post-socialist state forces. This article also draws attention to the gender difference in childhood experience across three generations and reveals how the one-child policy has contributed to the increasing value of girls in urban China.

EMBEDDED AND AUTONOMOUS MARKETS IN NORTH KOREA'S FISHING INDUSTRY: RESOURCE SCARCITY, MONITORING COSTS, AND EVOLVING INSTITUTIONS

AbstractNorth Korea today is a most unusual post-socialist state. Market actors and market prices are integral to economic life, but private property remains illegal, and private enterprise outside the household is de jure non-existent. In such an institutional context, some market processes are more autonomous in relation to the state, while others are more embedded within state structures. In this article, we offer a theoretical account of the shape that North Korea's market economy has taken, developed from a set of fishing industry case studies. We note four broad categories of enterprises: closely embedded, loosely embedded, semi-autonomous, and autonomous. By relative autonomy/embeddedness we mean control over fixed assets, cash flow, and operational decisions such as wage and price setting. We postulate three major determinants of embeddedness/autonomy: (1) relative strategic resource scarcity between state and market actors, (2) monitoring costs, and (3) institutional evolution that reflects these realities, though to varying extents.

A pioneering study on post-socialist state

A pioneering study on post-socialist state

The Man Who Struck the Judge with a Fly Swatter: Justice and Performance in Contemporary Kazakhstan

This article investigates a series of events that occurred in Quaragandy, a postindustrial city in northern Kazakhstan in the mid-2010s. These events led to Evgenii Tankov, an established lawyer, hitting a judge, Arai Alshynbekov, with a fly swatter during a routine court session. This research demonstrates that Tankov's act was not a flash of rage or a real attempt to harm the judge. It was, instead, a calculated strategy in which a political statement was concealed if not sheathed within the form of a grotesque performance. Tankov knew he would be judged for disrespect towards the court: and yet he used his subsequent trial to demonstrate the moral and intellectual impasse of Kazakhstan's judicial system. This article claims that as a performance, Tankov's case is useful because it allows one to re-think the genre itself. Moreover, it argues that the form of the trial per se became a genre of political agency in contemporary Kazakhstan. As an example of political praxis, this case allows one to question the ways in which non-political actors produce and affirm their identities and create new forms of political agency in a reality in which political behavior is bounded by a postsocialist authoritarian state.

(Re)Constructing the Baikal-Amur Mainline

Abstract The construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) in East Siberia and the Russian Far East in the 1970s and 1980s was the largest technological and social engineering project of late socialism. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the BAM was dogged by economic bust, decline, and public disillusionment. BAM-2, a recently launched state program of technological modernization, aims to complete a second railway track. The project elicits memories as well as new hopes and expectations, especially among “builders of the BAM.” This article explores continuity and change between BAM-1 and BAM-2. It argues that the reconstruction efforts of the postsocialist state are predetermined by the durability of the infrastructure as a materialization of collective identities, memories, and emotions.

(Re)Constructing the Baikal-Amur Mainline

Abstract The construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) in East Siberia and the Russian Far East in the 1970s and 1980s was the largest technological and social engineering project of late socialism. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the BAM was dogged by economic bust, decline, and public disillusionment. BAM-2, a recently launched state program of technological modernization, aims to complete a second railway track. The project elicits memories as well as new hopes and expectations, especially among “builders of the BAM.” This article explores continuity and change between BAM-1 and BAM-2. It argues that the reconstruction efforts of the postsocialist state are predetermined by the durability of the infrastructure as a materialization of collective identities, memories, and emotions.

Laos. Changing lives in Laos: Society, politics, and culture in a post-socialist state Edited by Vanina Bouté and Vatthana Pholsena Singapore: NUS Press, 2017. Pp. 472. Maps, Illustrations, Tables, Bibliography, Index.

Laos. Changing lives in Laos: Society, politics, and culture in a post-socialist state Edited by Vanina Bouté and Vatthana Pholsena Singapore: NUS Press, 2017. Pp. 472. Maps, Illustrations, Tables, Bibliography, Index. - Volume 51 Issue 3

Infrastructural developmental citizenship: Chinese lawyers and state-framed marketization

ABSTRACT China’s judicial system supports state-led developmentalism, whereby recently reinstated lawyers are expected to concentrate their practice on servicing marketized economic activities for the sake of national economic development. In other words, contemporary Chinese lawyers, as part of the legal infrastructure for the increasingly marketized economy, are practically required to be developmental lawyers, so they broadly share the developmental citizenship of most Chinese citizens. Such status of Chinese lawyers corresponds to the overall systemic order of China as a post-socialist state in which socio-economic liberalization has been advanced for developmental purposes without attendant political liberalization (that is, reforming the party-state dictatorship). While most lawyers have managed to survive or succeed in the context of such developmental instrumentality, their professional authority and integrity in upholding the rule of law have been chronically compromised by both the economic order that remains state-segmented and the political discouragement of civil rights advocacy.

Contingent Homes: Mobility and Long-Term Conflict in the Contested Periphery of Georgia

Abstract Displaced Georgians in the de facto Georgia-Abkhazia borderland have lived in a zone of protracted ambivalence and contingency for almost three decades. During the war between the post-Socialist Georgian state and Abkhaz forces supporting the independence of Abkhazia, Georgian residents of Abkhazia were forced to flee to Georgia proper. Soon after the war’s end, thousands of displaced people started to access their homes in Gali, the southern borderland of the de facto state of Abkhazia. By persistently navigating shifting places and sovereignties, displaced Georgians from Gali construct lives on the move in a disputed and militarized borderland where contingency, surveillance, and economic precarity infiltrate everyday life. In such a space of life projects grounded in contested mobilities, home emerges as a question of being able to move across a disputed border rather than returning to a singular and fixed place.

Development, Balkanism, and new (im)moralities in postsocialist Bosnia-Herzegovina

AbstractDespite considerable analysis of development policies in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, local-internationals encounters have received less attention. In an attempt to fill this gap, this article traces the discursive processes through which development professionals frame their narratives about Bosnian society, and in turn, how its inhabitants experience the internationals staying in the country. Applying Maria Todorova's framework, I show how Western “expatriates” tend to incorporate the Balkans’ liminality into their social constructs to depoliticize development practices. On the other hand, I approach emic understandings of Europeanness and Balkanism as a situationally embedded and contested process that comes into play to (re)draw social and moral boundaries in Bosnian society. I conclude by considering local-international encounters as a privileged site for exploring the postsocialist state but also new political subjectivities in contemporary Bosnia.

Adventists in Montenegro—From the Atheistic Psychosis of Socialism to the Post-socialist Individuation of Adventism

The process of converting individuals to a particular religious community is one of the issues addressed by the Sociology of Religion. In the post-socialist Montenegrin society, there have been research works related to dominant religious communities, the Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Islamic, while science has shown no interest in small religious groups. The Adventist movement in Montenegro, although present for a long period of time, has failed to mobilise individuals for conversion to a greater extent. Therefore, this research aims to find out when, under what conditions and in what way the individuals in Montenegro, as a post-socialist state, chose Adventism as religious affiliation, what affected this process the most, and were there any specificities in that regard. This paper is a result of a survey conducted via an in-depth interview with 17 believers of the Adventist Church. The obtained results indicate several valuable data: most respondents accepted the Adventist movement in Montenegro in the early 1990s; they got first-hand knowledge of this religion from their friends or wider family members and relatives, a consistent interpretation of the Holy Bible is the main reason for conversion. A significant factor in the process of conversion to Adventism is early religious socialisation within a family.

What happened to the Second World? Earthquakes and postsocialism in Kazakhstan.

There is an assumption that with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Second World ceased to exist. Yet the demise of the Communist bloc as a geopolitical reality did not mean that it stopped exerting a defining influence over how people think and behave. This article examines how the postsocialist state in Kazakhstan deals with potential crises such as earthquakes and the extent to which the Soviet legacy still shapes intellectual debates, state structures, and civil society organisations in in that country. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, this paper re-examines the Second World in its historical context and re-establishes it as a conceptual framework for considering disaster risk reduction in the former Soviet bloc. It argues that it is essential to pay attention to this legacy in Kazakhstan both in policy and practice if earthquake risk reduction is to be made more effective.

Changing Lives in Laos – Society, Politics and Culture in a Post-Socialist State

For many people working about and being interested in Laos the two editors (Boute and Pholsena) are well known icons of scientific research about their area of expertise. Vatthana Pholsena, in part...

Procedures and conditions for the selection of the constitutional court judges in the post-Yugoslav states

This article systematically analyzes the procedures and conditions for the selection of the constitutional judges in the legal systems of the six post-Yugoslav states. Yugoslavia was the only post-socialist state with constitutional courts within its federal system, far before the transition occurred. Consequently, each constitutional court in the post-Yugoslav area had more than a half century-long tradition of constitutional review. However, it is the period after the democratic changes that is at the centre of our examination. The legal provisions of the six states are analyzed separately and then compared with prominent comparative examples. The procedure and conditions under which the constitutional judges are selected are in the focus and cause this issue to contribute the most to the so-called input legitimacy of the constitutional courts. Hence, the article attempts to shed light on the weak points in the current provisions and to propose a more suitable legal framework.