Bulgaria's Democratic Consolidation and the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant

Bulgaria's Democratic Consolidation and the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant
Author: Matthew Tejada
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2005-01-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3898214397

Bulgaria's post-communist experience has been a fractured transition both politically and economically. How deeply has its democracy been consolidated? Has the residue of Bulgaria's communist era finally been sloughed off? Are there lingering threats to democratic stability that could delay Bulgaria's entry into the EU? And just how genuine a partner has the EU been in helping Bulgaria progress down its transition path? If there is one single issue that can help to illuminate these troubling questions, it is the long and controversial history of the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant. With Kozloduy producing perhaps as much as forty percent of Bulgaria'selectricity all Bulgarians' fate was inevitably connected with the nuclearplant. That so important a question has not been sufficiently covered in western-language publications is partly due to the fact that information has been so hard to come by, and most researchers did not have the language qualifications necessary to pursue local investigations.Matthew Tejada has interviewed many of those in the Kozloduy saga and has read through archives and other sources not previously made known to western researchers. What he has to say tells us a great deal that is new about a neglected but vitally important issue.

Bulgaria's Democratic Consolidation and the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant

Bulgaria's Democratic Consolidation and the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant
Author: Matthew S. Tejada
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2005-01-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3838254392

Bulgaria's post-communist experience has been a fractured transition both politically and economically. How deeply has its democracy been consolidated? Has the residue of Bulgaria's communist era finally been sloughed off? Are there lingering threats to democratic stability that could delay Bulgaria's entry into the EU? And just how genuine a partner has the EU been in helping Bulgaria progress down its transition path? If there is one single issue that can help to illuminate these troubling questions, it is the long and controversial history of the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant. With Kozloduy producing perhaps as much as forty percent of Bulgaria's electricity all Bulgarians' fate was inevitably connected with the nuclearplant. That so important a question has not been sufficiently covered in western-language publications is partly due to the fact that information has been so hard to come by, and most researchers did not have the language qualifications necessary to pursue local investigations.Matthew Tejada has interviewed many of those in the Kozloduy saga and has read through archives and other sources not previously made known to western researchers. What he has to say tells us a great deal that is new about a neglected but vitally important issue.

Cleft Countries

Cleft Countries
Author: Ivan Katchanovski
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2006-04-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3838255585

During the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine, the second largest country in Europe came close to a violent break-up similar to that in neighboring Moldova, which witnessed a violent secession of the Transdniestria region. Numerous elections, including the hotly contested 2004 presidential elections in Ukraine, and surveys of public opinion showed significant regional divisions in these post-Soviet countries. Western parts of Ukraine and Moldova, as well as the Muslim Crimean Tatars, were vocal supporters of independence, nationalist, and pro-Western parties and politicians. In contrast, Eastern regions, as well as the Orthodox Turkic-speaking Gagauz, consistently expressed pro-Russian and pro-Communist political orientations. Which factors -- historical legacies, religion, economy, ethnicity, or political leadership -- could explain these divisions? Why was Ukraine able to avoid a violent break-up, in contrast to Moldova? This is the first book to offer a systematic and comparative analysis of the regional political divisions in post-Soviet Ukraine and Moldova. The study examines voting behavior and political attitudes in two groups of regions: those which were under Russian, Ottoman, and Soviet rule; and those which were under Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Czechoslovak rule until World War I or World War II. This book attributes the regional political divisions to the differences in historical experience. This study helps us to better understand regional cleavages and conflicts, not only in Ukraine and Moldova, but also in other cleft countries.

The Russian Orthodox Church and Modernity

The Russian Orthodox Church and Modernity
Author: Regina Elsner
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2021-10-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3838215680

The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) faced various iterations of modernization throughout its history. This conflicted encounter continues in the ROC’s current resistance against—what it perceives as—Western modernity including liberal and secular values. This study examines the historical development of the ROC’s arguments against—and sometimes preferences for—modernization and analyzes which positions ended up influencing the official doctrine. The book’s systematic analysis of dogmatic treatises shows the ROC’s considerable ability of constructive engagement with various aspects of the modern world. Balancing between theological traditions of unity and plurality, the ROC’s today context of operating within an authoritarian state appears to tip the scale in favor of unity.

Urban Protest

Urban Protest
Author: Arve Hansen
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2021-09-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3838214951

Urban space is an important part of the political environment—a place where people congregate to discuss, deliberate, and interact with each other. In times of great public discontent, people often turn to urban spaces to make their opinions heard and to demand change, with varying degrees of success. How are mass protests affected by the urban public space in which they occur? This book provides a theoretical model to analyze city spaces, based on the use of theories from political science, urban planning, and sociology. Hansen’s approach consists of a mapping of the causal mechanisms between spatial elements, the political environment, and their combined effects on protests. This mapping is applied to three case studies—Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow. In addition to the spatial perspective model, Urban Protest provides new insights as to how the interactions in space occur, and demonstrates how geography can create limitations and opportunities in a large variety of ways.

On the Verge of History

On the Verge of History
Author: Izabella Agardi
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 486
Release: 2022-04-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3838216024

Rural women have not had a formative role in the public histories of Central Eastern Europe. Izabella Agárdi aims to correct that by concentrating on their life stories and their connections to general histories. She investigates how Hungarian-speaking, ordinary women in rural contexts born in the 1920s and 1930s remember and talk about the twentieth century they have experienced, and how, through their stories, they articulate historical change and construct themselves as historical subjects. In her analysis, Izabella Agárdi traces the interactions between micro- and macro- narratives as well as the specific tools women of this generation appropriate to talk about personal memories of their often traumatic past. From these stories, a particular mnemonic community emerges, one that speaks from a highly precarious position 'on the verge of history'. It is up to future generations whether these women's experiences will be remembered or forgotten.

Post-Soviet Secessionism

Post-Soviet Secessionism
Author: Daria Minakov, Mikhail Sasse, Gwendolyn Minakov, Mikhail Isachenko
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2021-04-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3838215389

The USSR’s dissolution resulted in the creation of not only fifteen recognized states but also of four non-recognized statelets: Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Transnistria. Their polities comprise networks with state-like elements. Since the early 1990s, the four pseudo-states have been continously dependent on their sponsor countries (Russia, Armenia), and contesting the territorial integrity of their parental nation-states Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova. In 2014, the outburst of Russia-backed separatism in Eastern Ukraine led to the creation of two more para-states, the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR), whose leaders used the experience of older de facto states. In 2020, this growing network of de facto states counted an overall population of more than 4 million people. The essays collected in this volume address such questions as: How do post-Soviet de facto states survive and continue to grow? Is there anything specific about the political ecology of Eastern Europe that provides secessionism with the possibility to launch state-making processes in spite of international sanctions and counteractions of their parental states? How do secessionist movements become embedded in wider networks of separatism in Eastern and Western Europe? What is the impact of secessionism and war on the parental states? The contributors are Jan Claas Behrends, Petra Colmorgen, Bruno Coppieters, Nataliia Kasianenko, Alice Lackner, Mikhail Minakov, and Gwendolyn Sasse.

Geopolitical Rivalries in the “Common Neighborhood”

Geopolitical Rivalries in the “Common Neighborhood”
Author: Vasif Huseynov
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2019-11-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3838212770

This timely book analyses ‘soft power’ in the light of neoclassical realist premises as part of the foreign policy toolkit of great powers to expand their sphere of influence. Vasif Huseynov argues that if nuclear armed great powers compete against the same type of powers to expand or sustain their sphere of influence over a populated region, they use soft power as a major expansive instrument while military power remains a tool to defend themselves and back up their foreign policies. Presenting his model of soft power, the author explores the role of soft power projection by great powers in the formation of the external alignment of regional states. He focuses on the rivalries between Russia and the West (i.e. the EU and the USA) over the states located between the EU and Russia (the region known as the “common [or shared] neighborhood”) and on two of these regional states (Ukraine and Belarus) to test his hypotheses.

Putin's Predicament

Putin's Predicament
Author: Bo Petersson
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2021-09-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3838210506

Using the Russian president’s major public addresses as the main source, Bo Petersson analyzes the legitimization strategies employed during Vladimir Putin’s third and fourth terms in office. The argument is that these strategies have rested on Putin’s highly personalized blend of strongman-image projection and presentation as the embodiment of Russia’s great power myth. Putin appears as the only credible guarantor against renewed weakness, political chaos, and interference from abroad—in particular from the US. After a first deep crisis of legitimacy manifested itself by the massive protests in 2011–2012, the annexation of Crimea led to a lengthy boost in Putin’s popularity figures. The book discusses how the Crimea effect is, by 2021, trailing off and Putin’s charismatic authority is increasingly questioned by opposition from Alexei Navalny, the effects of unpopular reforms, and poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, Russia is bound to head for a succession crisis as the legitimacy of the political system continues to be built on Putin’s projected personal characteristics and—now apparently waning—charisma, and since no potential heir apparent has been allowed on center stage. The constitutional reform of summer 2020 made it possible in theory for Putin to continue as president until 2036. Yet, this change did not address the Russian political system’s fundamental future leadership dilemma.

The February 2015 Assassination of Boris Nemtsov and the Flawed Trial of his Alleged Killers

The February 2015 Assassination of Boris Nemtsov and the Flawed Trial of his Alleged Killers
Author: John B. Dunlop
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2019-01-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 383821188X

The book provides a detailed description of “the Russian crime of the twenty-first century” as well as a thorough examination of the eighty sessions of the nine-month-long trial (during 2016-2017) of Boris Nemtsov’s alleged killers. It directs attention to the chief obstacle in determining what precisely happened shortly before midnight on February 27, 2015, on a bridge located a mere stone’s throw away from the Kremlin, in an area under the active surveillance of the Russian Federal Protective Service. The glaring absence of closed circuit videos from this most heavily guarded site in Russia is underscored. Given the absence of such key evidence, those seeking to investigate the murder have been akin to blind people stumbling about in obscurity. The attempts to penetrate this man-made fog undertaken during the course of the trial by the Nemtsov family attorneys, Vadim Prokhorov and Olga Mikhailova, as well as by numerous tenacious analysts of the crime, such as former deputy Russian energy minister Vladimir Milov, former Russian presidential economics advisor Andrei Illarionov, and leading mathematician Andrei Piontkovskii, are covered in full. The uneven case mounted by the prosecution and the scrappy defense effort of the attorneys for the alleged killers, many of them ethnic Chechens, are highlighted, as is the non-unanimous verdict which was reached by the twelve jurors. The findings of this study are in agreement with those of a number of commentators who contend that the actual organizers of the crime remain at large as does the assassination’s shadowy mastermind.