CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

Election forensics is a growing field of statistical techniques that can be used to detect suspicious patterns in election data. Researchers are increasingly turning to such methods to detect and evaluate potential manipulation in elections, both internationally and in the US. This lecture will present a brief overview of the state of the art, discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the election forensic approach, and then demonstrate how election forensic methods can be used to study variation in electoral manipulation at the subnational level in Russia and Ukraine. In particular, it will show how the type of election manipulation that parties employ in a territory depends both on their access to patronage resources and the degree to which they face political risks in that region.

Savelyeva explores the transformation of political culture in Russia from 2011-2019, describing a shift in attitudes toward protest, changes in the motivations and strategies of the opposition, and the burgeoning role of local activism in these movements.

Brel considers the post-communist development of the Republic of Belarus and suggests an answer to the question of why the country failed to democratize. Employing modernization theory, the presentation analyzes the connection between economic development and democracy, and between civil society and democracy. It also explores the idea that the absence of a strong national consciousness might have contributed to the country’s inability to democratize.

In this talk, Brooks will present an abbreviated statement of fact and personal experience dealing with the Supreme Commercial (Arbitrazh) Court of Russia from 1991 to 2016. He will tell the first-hand story of working with the Court as it reformed and adopted principles intrinsic to an independent, objective, and fair court system, and practices consistent with the rule of law, individual rights, transparency and deterring corruption. The lecture will conclude with a discussion of governmental and political pressures which rolled back much commercial court reform.

The interconnected terrorist and criminal milieus are believed to be a critical destabilizing factor in today’s global security environment, yet the trafficking/terrorism nexus remains highly politicized and loosely applied concept. What is the nature of trafficking/terrorism connections and how do they vary across states? Does the trafficking/terrorism nexus amplify the threat of terrorist violence? Focusing on Central Asia, this presentation offers surprising answers to these and other questions. It challenges the assumption that the intersection of terrorist and criminal activity is a prevalent, or even a common, occurrence.

Popular understanding of modern authoritarianism lacks a satisfying explanation for the genuine popularity of autocrats, as many clearly enjoy enthusiastic support even in times of economic stagnation or decline. In their recently published book, Robertson and his co-author argue that part of the solution lies in unpacking the role of emotions in building support for rulers. Drawing on a unique panel survey conducted shortly before and after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, they discover that the resulting “rally” around the authoritarian flag involves much more than simply support for the leader or a simple increase in nationalism. Rather, they witness a broad shift in respondents’ emotional orientation. Driven by the shared, mediated experience of the Crimean “moment”, this shift improves people’s evaluation of their social, political and economic surroundings in the present, the future – and even the past.

In this talk Dr. Rucker-Chang employs a postcolonial frame to highlight how the depiction of Roma in post-Yugoslav film render them postcolonial “objects,” knowable by way of difference constructed through racial hierarchies, stereotypes, and culture.

In this lecture, Dr. Austin Charron discusses findings from his PhD dissertation concerning socio-spatial identities among residents of Crimea who were internally displaced to mainland Ukraine following Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in 2014. Building on previous research into Crimean identities from before the annexation, Charron’s work examines evolving discourses of regional and national belonging among Crimea’s ethnic Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians, and Russians now living in the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Lviv, and considers the question of whether these groups may constitute a diaspora.

Timothy Nunan is a Lecturer (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) and a Freigeist Fellow at the Center for Global History at the Free University of Berlin. He is the author of Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (Cambridge UP, 2016). In this lecture he discusses how the Islamic Republic of Iran was founded on the slogan of “Neither East Nor West”–neither alignment with the Soviet Union nor the United States. The end of the 1980s saw, however, a rapprochement between Tehran and Moscow that would form the basis for relations between the countries to the present day. Drawing on archival resources and memoirs from the former Soviet Union, Iran, and Afghanistan, this talk explores how CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and Iranian elites such as Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Khamene’i abandoned pretensions of leading the global anti-imperialist movement and sought to use relations with the other to navigate world politics between the end of the Cold War and the Gulf War.

In this lecture, Dr. Nikita Zakharov explores the political economy of media harassment in Russia by using a unique monthly dataset on the incidents of harassment of the media in Russian cities between 2004 and 2017 to establish political cycles driven by local elections. This research analyzed frequency of harassment incidents during the two months before a local election – a period that coincides with the official period of the electoral campaign. The lecture will also discuss how the effect differs with respect to the level of local election.