Divorce Trends in Seven Countries Over the Long Transition from State Socialism: 1981–2004

The collapse of communism was a defining geopolitical event of late-20th century Europe, with well-documented economic, social, and political implications. Yet there is a striking absence of research on how it influenced divorce. The objective of this study is to provide an exploratory analysis of trends in divorce over the long transition from communism—starting from the decline of the communist economy in the 1980s and ending with economic revival—in seven countries: Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Russia. We discuss how the transition could be expected to either increase or decrease divorce risks. We analyze retrospective micro-level data on first marriages from the Changing Life Course Regimes in Eastern Europe (CLiCR) dataset. Based on our event-history analyses, we find that divorce rates increased in each country at some stage during the long transition and these increases cannot be explained by compositional change of the marriages. However, no uniform pattern emerged in the timing and duration of the increase in divorce risk. This striking variation leads us to conclude that even the effect of major societal ruptures is contextually contingent

Spousal separation, selectivity and contextual effects: exploring the relationship between international labour migration and fertility in post-Soviet Tajikistan

This paper contributes to the sparse literature on the impact of temporary migration on fertility in origin areas. It examines the case of male labour migration from post-Soviet Tajikistan, a significant and relatively recent phenomenon. Fertility and migration models are solved simultaneously to account for cross-process correlation. There is clear evidence for a short-term disruptive effect of spousal separation, but it is too early to assess the implications for completed fertility. While there is no evidence for unobserved selectivity at the couple level, there is a significant positive correlation between the migration and fertility processes at the community level

The socioeconomic roots of conflict in the Caucasus

We argue that the conflicts in the Caucasus are the result of the abrogation by the elite of the earlier, Soviet era social contract. This process was accompanied by the collapse of the formal economy; evidenced by huge national income compression, falling public goods provision, and growing inequality and poverty. In the absence of state provision of basic amenities and governance, ordinary people are compelled to fall back on kinship ties. Declining standards of governance facilitate state-sponsored corruption and criminality in a setting where the shadow economic activity is increasingly important to individual survival strategies. Oil pipelines and the right to control the transit of goods both legal and illegal also underlie conflict in the region. Criminality has replaced ethnicity as the major motivation for conflict and conflict per se has become a lucrative source of income. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.