CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

In this talk, Brooks will present an abbreviated statement of fact and personal experience dealing with the Supreme Commercial (Arbitrazh) Court of Russia from 1991 to 2016. He will tell the first-hand story of working with the Court as it reformed and adopted principles intrinsic to an independent, objective, and fair court system, and practices consistent with the rule of law, individual rights, transparency and deterring corruption. The lecture will conclude with a discussion of governmental and political pressures which rolled back much commercial court reform.

The interconnected terrorist and criminal milieus are believed to be a critical destabilizing factor in today’s global security environment, yet the trafficking/terrorism nexus remains highly politicized and loosely applied concept. What is the nature of trafficking/terrorism connections and how do they vary across states? Does the trafficking/terrorism nexus amplify the threat of terrorist violence? Focusing on Central Asia, this presentation offers surprising answers to these and other questions. It challenges the assumption that the intersection of terrorist and criminal activity is a prevalent, or even a common, occurrence.

Popular understanding of modern authoritarianism lacks a satisfying explanation for the genuine popularity of autocrats, as many clearly enjoy enthusiastic support even in times of economic stagnation or decline. In their recently published book, Robertson and his co-author argue that part of the solution lies in unpacking the role of emotions in building support for rulers. Drawing on a unique panel survey conducted shortly before and after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, they discover that the resulting “rally” around the authoritarian flag involves much more than simply support for the leader or a simple increase in nationalism. Rather, they witness a broad shift in respondents’ emotional orientation. Driven by the shared, mediated experience of the Crimean “moment”, this shift improves people’s evaluation of their social, political and economic surroundings in the present, the future – and even the past.

In this talk Dr. Rucker-Chang employs a postcolonial frame to highlight how the depiction of Roma in post-Yugoslav film render them postcolonial “objects,” knowable by way of difference constructed through racial hierarchies, stereotypes, and culture.

In this lecture, Dr. Austin Charron discusses findings from his PhD dissertation concerning socio-spatial identities among residents of Crimea who were internally displaced to mainland Ukraine following Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in 2014. Building on previous research into Crimean identities from before the annexation, Charron’s work examines evolving discourses of regional and national belonging among Crimea’s ethnic Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians, and Russians now living in the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Lviv, and considers the question of whether these groups may constitute a diaspora.

Timothy Nunan is a Lecturer (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) and a Freigeist Fellow at the Center for Global History at the Free University of Berlin. He is the author of Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (Cambridge UP, 2016). In this lecture he discusses how the Islamic Republic of Iran was founded on the slogan of “Neither East Nor West”–neither alignment with the Soviet Union nor the United States. The end of the 1980s saw, however, a rapprochement between Tehran and Moscow that would form the basis for relations between the countries to the present day. Drawing on archival resources and memoirs from the former Soviet Union, Iran, and Afghanistan, this talk explores how CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and Iranian elites such as Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Khamene’i abandoned pretensions of leading the global anti-imperialist movement and sought to use relations with the other to navigate world politics between the end of the Cold War and the Gulf War.

In this lecture, Dr. Nikita Zakharov explores the political economy of media harassment in Russia by using a unique monthly dataset on the incidents of harassment of the media in Russian cities between 2004 and 2017 to establish political cycles driven by local elections. This research analyzed frequency of harassment incidents during the two months before a local election – a period that coincides with the official period of the electoral campaign. The lecture will also discuss how the effect differs with respect to the level of local election.

This talk examines Soviet nationalities policy in Central Asia through the lens of a prosopographical overview of ethnic Kazakhs within the Kazakhstan’s pre-war nomenklatura, using biographical data to provide a statistical picture of Kazakhstan’s Party elite. Analyzing those Kazakhs who served as members of the republic’s Party Bureau between 1920 and 1937—examining when and where they were born, where they went to school, and when and how they joined the Party—offers insight into the broader process of elite formation in the early Soviet period, revealing clear patterns in terms of who became a Bolshevik and what types of people achieved political success in the first two decades of Soviet rule. It also illustrates the enduring resonance of the Russian colonial presence in Kazakhstan in determining the course of revolutionary change in the republic, and indeed its political landscape across the following decades.

This talk introduces key themes from Scott Levi’s recent book on the Khanate of Khoqand, a surprisingly dynamic state that emerged over the course of the eighteenth century in eastern Uzbekistan’s Ferghana Valley. The lecture addresses the ways that political, economic, technological and environmental developments influenced life in Central Asia and contributed to the rise, and fall, of Khoqand. It also identifies a number of ways that Central Asians influenced the policies of their much larger imperial neighbors on the Eurasian periphery – especially Tsarist Russia and Qing China.

The past three decades are marked by substantial improvements in many Reproductive Health indicators across the countries of Central Asia. Increases in aggregate levels of knowledge, access, and practice of family planning are particularly impressive and represent substantial improvements in the health and well being of women. However, are these benefits shared equally across all women? Employing qualitative and quantitative data Cynthia traces the impact of cultural norms and structural factors on limiting the ability of rural, less educated, unmarried, and childless men and women to reap the benefits of reproductive health improvements.