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Author: Svante Cornell Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812208986 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 293
Book Description
In the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its zone of influence, few insurgent groups had the resources necessary to confront regular armies. At the same time, state-sponsored financial support for insurgencies dramatically decreased. The pressing need to raise funds for war and the weakness of law enforcement in conflict zones create fertile conditions for organized crime; indeed, there is a mounting body of evidence correlating armed conflict and illicit economy, though the nature of this link and its impact on regional politics has not been well understood. Conflict, Crime, and the State in Postcommunist Eurasia explores the relationship between ideologically motivated insurgents, profit-motivated crime, and state institutions in eight conflict zones. Through detailed case studies, the contributors demonstrate how the operations and incentives of insurgents may emerge and shift over time: for some armed groups, crime can become an end in itself beyond a financial means, but not all armed groups equally adapt to illicit commerce. They also show how the criminalization of state institutions is a lingering concerns even after armed conflicts end. Conflict, Crime, and the State in Postcommunist Eurasia places the case studies along a continuum of political and criminal behavior, examining the factors that motivate insurgents to seek out criminal alliance, how this connection affects the dynamics of conflict, and what risks remain during postconflict transition. These findings will provide a better understanding of the types of challenges likely to confront peacekeeping and statebuilding endeavors in other parts of the world. Contributors: Jana Arsovska, Svante Cornell, Johan Engvall, Michael Jonsson, Alexandru Molcean, Niklas Nilsson, Murad Batal al-Shishani, Natalie Verständig.
Author: Svante Cornell Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812208986 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 293
Book Description
In the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its zone of influence, few insurgent groups had the resources necessary to confront regular armies. At the same time, state-sponsored financial support for insurgencies dramatically decreased. The pressing need to raise funds for war and the weakness of law enforcement in conflict zones create fertile conditions for organized crime; indeed, there is a mounting body of evidence correlating armed conflict and illicit economy, though the nature of this link and its impact on regional politics has not been well understood. Conflict, Crime, and the State in Postcommunist Eurasia explores the relationship between ideologically motivated insurgents, profit-motivated crime, and state institutions in eight conflict zones. Through detailed case studies, the contributors demonstrate how the operations and incentives of insurgents may emerge and shift over time: for some armed groups, crime can become an end in itself beyond a financial means, but not all armed groups equally adapt to illicit commerce. They also show how the criminalization of state institutions is a lingering concerns even after armed conflicts end. Conflict, Crime, and the State in Postcommunist Eurasia places the case studies along a continuum of political and criminal behavior, examining the factors that motivate insurgents to seek out criminal alliance, how this connection affects the dynamics of conflict, and what risks remain during postconflict transition. These findings will provide a better understanding of the types of challenges likely to confront peacekeeping and statebuilding endeavors in other parts of the world. Contributors: Jana Arsovska, Svante Cornell, Johan Engvall, Michael Jonsson, Alexandru Molcean, Niklas Nilsson, Murad Batal al-Shishani, Natalie Verständig.
Author: Mariya Omelicheva Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231547919 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 229
Book Description
Counterterrorism experts and policy makers have warned of the peril posed by the links between violent extremism and organized crime, especially the relationship between drug trafficking and terrorism funding. Yet Central Asia, the site of extensive opium trafficking, sees low levels of terrorist violence. Webs of Corruption is an innovative study demonstrating that terrorist and criminal activity intersect more narrowly than is widely believed—and that the state plays the pivotal role in shaping those interconnections. Mariya Y. Omelicheva and Lawrence P. Markowitz analyze the linkages between the drug trade and terrorism financing in Central Asia, finding that state security services shape the nexus of trafficking and terrorism. While organized crime and terrorism do intersect in parts of the region, profit-driven criminal organizations and politically motivated violent groups come together based on the nature of state involvement. Governments in high-trafficking regions are drawn into illicit economies and forge relationships with a range of nonstate violent actors, such as insurgents, erstwhile regime opponents, and transnational groups. Omelicheva and Markowitz contend that these relationships can mitigate terrorism—by redirecting these actors toward other forms of violence. Offering a groundbreaking combination of quantitative, qualitative, and geographic information systems methods to map trafficking/terrorism connections on the ground, Webs of Corruption provides a meticulously researched, counterintuitive perspective on a potent regional security problem.
Author: Anna Ohanyan Publisher: Georgetown University Press ISBN: 162616620X Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 229
Book Description
While we know a great deal about the benefits of regional integration, there is a knowledge gap when it comes to areas with weak, dysfunctional, or nonexistent regional fabric in political and economic life. Further, deliberate “un-regioning,” applied by actors external as well as internal to a region, has also gone unnoticed despite its increasingly sophisticated modern application by Russia in its peripheries. This volume helps us understand what Anna Ohanyan calls “fractured regions” and their consequences for contemporary global security. Ohanyan introduces a theory of regional fracture to explain how and why regions come apart, consolidate dysfunctional ties within the region, and foster weak states. Russia Abroad specifically examines how Russia employs regional fracture as a strategy to keep states on its periphery in Eurasia and the Middle East weak and in Russia's orbit. It argues that the level of regional maturity in Russia’s vast vicinities is an important determinant of Russian foreign policy in the emergent multipolar world order. Many of these fractured regions become global security threats because weak states are more likely to be hubs of transnational crime, havens for militants, or sites of protracted conflict. The regional fracture theory is offered as a fresh perspective about the post-American world and a way to broaden international relations scholarship on comparative regionalism.
Author: Christoph Zurcher Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 0814797245 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 302
Book Description
A brief history of the Caucusus region during and after the Post-Soviet Wars The Post-Soviet Wars is a comparative account of the organized violence in the Caucusus region, looking at four key areas: Chechnya, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Dagestan. Zürcher’s goal is to understand the origin and nature of the violence in these regions, the response and suppression from the post-Soviet regime and the resulting outcomes, all with an eye toward understanding why some conflicts turned violent, whereas others not. Notably, in Dagestan actual violent conflict has not erupted, an exception of political stability for the region. The book provides a brief history of the region, particularly the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting changes that took place in the wake of this toppling. Zürcher carefully looks at the conditions within each region—economic, ethnic, religious, and political—to make sense of why some turned to violent conflict and some did not and what the future of the region might portend. This important volume provides both an overview of the region that is both up-to-date and comprehensive as well as an accessible understanding of the current scholarship on mobilization and violence.
Author: Nina Lutterjohann Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1666959278 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 393
Book Description
International Organizations and Post-Soviet Conflicts in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine: The Limitations of Imagining Peace and the Failure and Success in Negotiations addresses the protracted history of international conflict resolution efforts to the Georgian-Abkhaz, Moldovan-Transnistrian, and Eastern Ukraine conflicts. The author explores the origins and onset of these first two conflicts in the early 1990s, but also looks at the eruption of conflict in Eastern Ukraine in 2014 and at the first months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This book shows how, from a conflict-transformation perspective, local vested interests and strategic interests have created obvious obstructions that have both fueled the conflicts and prevented their resolution. This volume develops a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding the success and failure of international engagement that offers a new understanding of the extent to which international responses may or may not be helpful. Through an analysis of over 500 closed-source documents and about 70 interviews, the efforts of pan-European international organizations — with mandates from the OSCE, EU, UN, and NATO — are examined on both political and cultural levels. This work’s innovative analyses of those institutions’ performances shows how successes have often been overlooked and identifies misperceptions that reshape our understanding of the limitations to imagining peace.
Author: Abel Polese Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351585185 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
This book is a comprehensive collection of key scholarship on informality from the whole post-socialist region. From Bosnia to Central Asia, passing through Russia and Azerbaijan, the contributions to this volume illustrate the multi-faceted and complex nature of informality, while demonstrating the growing scholarly and policy debates that have developed around the understanding of informality. In contrast to approaches which tend to classify informality as ‘bad’ or ‘transitional’ – meaning that modernity will make it disappear – this edited volume concentrates on dynamics and mechanisms to understand and explain informality, while also debating its relationship with the market and society. The authors seek to explain informality beyond a mere monetaristic/economistic approach, rediscovering its interconnection with social phenomena to propose a more holistic interpretation of the meaning of informality and its influence in various spheres of life. They do this by exploring the evolving role of informal practices in the post-socialist region, and by focusing on informality as a social organisation determinant but also looking at the way it reshapes emergent social resistance against symbolic and real political order(s). This book was originally published as two special issues, of Caucasus Survey and the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe.
Author: Richard Pomfret Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691185409 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
This book analyzes the Central Asian economies of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, from their buffeting by the commodity boom of the early 2000s to its collapse in 2014. Richard Pomfret examines the countries’ relations with external powers and the possibilities for development offered by infrastructure projects as well as rail links between China and Europe. The transition of these nations from centrally planned to market-based economic systems was essentially complete by the early 2000s, when the region experienced a massive increase in world prices for energy and mineral exports. This raised incomes in the main oil and gas exporters, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan; brought more benefits to the most populous country, Uzbekistan; and left the poorest countries, the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan, dependent on remittances from migrant workers in oil-rich Russia and Kazakhstan. Pomfret considers the enhanced role of the Central Asian nations in the global economy and their varied ties to China, the European Union, Russia, and the United States. With improved infrastructure and connectivity between China and Europe (reflected in regular rail freight services since 2011 and China’s announcement of its Belt and Road Initiative in 2013), relaxation of United Nations sanctions against Iran in 2016, and the change in Uzbekistan’s presidency in late 2016, a window of opportunity appears to have opened for Central Asian countries to achieve more sustainable economic futures.
Author: Mark Galeotti Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300187629 Category : True Crime Languages : en Pages : 349
Book Description
The first English-language book to document the men who emerged from the Soviet-era gulags to become Russia’s international criminal class. Mark Galeotti is the go-to expert on organized crime in Russia, consulted by governments and police around the world. Now, Western readers can explore the fascinating history of the vory v zakone, a criminal organization that has survived and thrived through Stalinism, the Cold War, the Afghan War, and the end of the Soviet experiment. The vory—as the Russian mafia is also known—was born early in the twentieth century, largely in the Gulags and criminal camps, where they developed their unique culture. Identified by their signature tattoos, members abided by the thieves’ code, a strict system that forbade all paid employment and cooperation with law enforcement and the state. Based on two decades of on-the-ground research, Galeotti’s captivating study details the vory’s journey to power from their early days to their adaptation to modern-day Russia’s free-wheeling oligarchy and global opportunities beyond.
Author: Mikhail Troitskiy Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP ISBN: 1928096603 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
Conflicts in Eurasia have been receiving significant attention in the last few years from political scientists and international relations scholars. The geographic area of Eurasia lies at the intersection of global and regional conflicts and coordination games. On the one hand, regional controversies in Eurasia often affect relations among the great powers on a global scale – for instance, Russia believes it is engaged in a clash with the United States and its allies in post-Soviet Eurasia and that by obstructing EU and US policies in its neighbourhood, Moscow not only protects its security interests but also precipitates the demise of the US-centric world order. On the other hand, global rivalries can either exacerbate tensions or facilitate negotiated solutions across Eurasia, mostly as a result of competitive behaviour among major powers in conflict mediation. Few scholars have focused on the negotiation process or brought together the whole variety of seemingly disparate yet comparable cases. This volume, edited by two global security experts – one from Canada and one from Russia – examines negotiations that continue after the “hot phase” of a conflict has ended and the focus becomes the search for lasting security solutions. Tug of War brings together conflict and security experts from Russia, Eurasia, and the West to tackle the overarching question: how useful has the process of negotiation been in resolving or mitigating different conflicts and coordination problems in Eurasia, compared to attempts at exploiting or achieving a decisive advantage over one’s opponents?
Author: Francisco Gutiérrez-Sanín Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000917142 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 196
Book Description
This book revisits and reframes the old, but active, debate on the relationship between criminality and civil war by bringing both the state and political power into the equation. It argues that the terms in which the debate is generally posed are still inadequate to address the complexities of this relationship, showing how criminalisation and de-criminalisation are deeply political and hotly contested processes. The shifting movements towards the separation -or convergence- between criminality and politics are part of the processes of constitution of both political power and state. The chapters in the volume flesh out the mechanisms and social dynamics through which this takes place. This edited volume will be of great interest to upper-level students, academics, and researchers in Politics, History and Criminology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Political Power.
Author: Svante Cornell
Author: Svante Cornell
Author: Mariya Omelicheva
Author: Anna Ohanyan
Author: Christoph Zurcher
Author: Nina Lutterjohann
Author: Abel Polese
Author: Richard Pomfret
Author: Mark Galeotti
Author: Mikhail Troitskiy
Author: Francisco Gutiérrez-Sanín