International Influences in Transition Societies: The Effect of UNHCR and Other IOs on Citizenship Policies in Ukraine

This paper analyzes the effects of international organizations on Ukrainian citizenship policies in the post-1991 period. As over 250,000 Crimean Tatars repatriated to Ukraine in the late 1980s and early 1990s after being forcefully deported in 1944, some 100,000 of them found themselves without Ukrainian citizenship, of which some 25,000 were stateless. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other international organizations have been working with the Ukrainian government to facilitate access to Ukrainian citizenship for these formerly deported people (FDPs)

The Cold Peace: Russo-Western Relations as a Mimetic Cold War

In 1989–1991 the geo-ideological contestation between two blocs was swept away, together with the ideology of civil war and its concomitant Cold War played out on the larger stage. Paradoxically, while the domestic sources of Cold War confrontation have been transcended, its external manifestations remain in the form of a ‘legacy’ geopolitical contest between the dominant hegemonic power (the United States) and a number of potential rising great powers, of which Russia is one. The post-revolutionary era is thus one of a ‘cold peace’. A cold peace is a mimetic cold war. In other words, while a cold war accepts the logic of conflict in the international system and between certain protagonists in particular, a cold peace reproduces the behavioural patterns of a cold war but suppresses acceptance of the logic of behaviour. A cold peace is accompanied by a singular stress on notions of victimhood for some and undigested and bitter victory for others. The perceived victim status of one set of actors provides the seedbed for renewed conflict, while the ‘victory’ of the others cannot be consolidated in some sort of relatively unchallenged post-conflict order. The ‘universalism’ of the victors is now challenged by Russia's neo-revisionist policy, including not so much the defence of Westphalian notions of sovereignty but the espousal of an international system with room for multiple systems (the Schmittean pluriverse)

Country report : Ukraine

Research for this EUDO Citizenship Observatory Country Report has been supported by the British Academy Research Project CITMODES, directed by the University of Edinburgh and the European University Institute.Revised version: 2013/2

Replication Data and Online Appendix for Hale, Shevel, and Onuch, "Believing Facts in the Fog of War: Identity, Media, and Hot Cognition in Ukraine’s 2014 Odesa Tragedy," Geopolitics, 2018

Online appendix, replication data, and do-files for Hale, Shevel, and Onuch, "Believing Facts in the Fog of War: Identity, Media, and Hot Cognition in Ukraine’s 2014 Odesa Tragedy," Geopolitics, 2018

Pluralism by Default and the Sources of Political Liberalization in Weak States

this paper, inhibited our understanding of why pluralistic and quasi democratic politics appeared and persisted in so many inhospitable environments such as Africa and the former Soviet Union. This paper focuses on regime trajectories and the challenges of authoritarian state building in Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine, which like many other countries in the developing world suffer from a set of historical and institutional characteristics that would seem to undermine democratic development -- a lack of democratic history, weak civil society, weak rule of law, and relative international isolation. Despite such obstacles, all four countries experienced relatively pluralistic politics at the beginning of the 1990s -- hovering somewhere between democratic and competitive authoritarian (Levitsky and Way 2002a) or hybrid rule. In order to fully understand the development of pluralism in inhospitable environments like the former Soviet Union, we need to broaden our analytic framework beyond an exclusive focus on democratic institution building. Some cases are better understood as failed authoritarian regimes rather than as struggling democracies. In the early 1990s, all four countries experienced varying degrees of pluralism by default, a form of democratic political competition specific to weak states lacking a robustly institutionalized civil society and rule of law. Pluralism by default describes cases in which the proximate source of political competition is less a robust civil society, strong democratic institutions or democratic leadership and much more the inability of incumbents to enforce authoritarian rule. In the former Soviet Union, elite-level disorientation, fragmentation and state weakness created by the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequ..