Writing Russia's future: paradigms, drivers, and scenarios

The development of prediction and forecasting in the social sciences over the past century and more is closely linked with developments in Russia. The Soviet collapse undermined confidence in predictive capabilities, and scenario planning emerged as the dominant future-oriented methodology in area studies, including the study of Russia. Scenarists anticipate multiple futures rather than predicting one. The approach is too rarely critiqued. Building on an account of Russia-related forecasting in the twentieth century, analysis of two decades of scenarios reveals uniform accounts which downplay the insights of experts and of social science theory alike

‘Down with communism – Power to the people’: The legacies of 1989 and beyond

This special issue brings together reflections on the thirtieth anniversary of the revolutions of 1989 and considers their consequences for our understandings of European and global society. What seemed for some at least the surprising and rapid collapse of Eastern European state socialism prompted rethinking in social theory about the potential for emancipatory politics and new modes of social and political organization. At the same time, there was increased reflection on the nature of varieties of capitalism and the meaning of socialism beyond the failure of at least its etatist and autarkic mode. The five articles here and the editors’ introduction address themes such as utopian hopes, civil society, the transformation of Europe, the world beyond 1989, and new configurations of power and conflict

Why did we get the end of the Cold War wrong?

In many important ways the history of modern international relations (IR) begins at the point when the international order collapses in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, the withering of communism in Central and Eastern Europe followed by the break–up of the USSR two years later, posed what many in the field saw then (and continue to regard now) as a series of problems to which the hitherto dominant paradigm in IR—realism—had no ready or easy answers. This article neither seeks to defend nor criticize realism. Rather it shifts the debate about the end of the cold war—and why most experts failed to anticipate it—away from the field of IR to the more specific study undertaken in the West of the Soviet system. It goes on to argue that the source of so much academic embarrassment may be better explained not through a rehearsal of realism's supposed flaws as an international theory, but rather through a detailed examination of the different ways that different writers understood, or more precisely failed to understand, the operation of the Soviet system itself. The conclusion reached is that few analysts could have predicted what happened between 1989 and 1991. In fact, as the article seeks to show, their often complicated and diverse theories about the USSR as the living alternative to market capitalism led most of them (with one or two notable exceptions) to the conclusion that whatever problems faced the Soviet Union as a power in the 1980s, the system as such was likely to endure