CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

The object of study here is Ukraine, a highly corrupted former Soviet republic. Specifically, Osipian researches the market of writing and defending doctoral dissertations, also known as the dissertations market. He identifies providers of the service, as well as types of services they offer and the prices they charge. Such “dissertations for order” services are accompanied by other services that...

When you enter the field to collect data for your dissertation or thesis, what are some basic safety precautions you need to consider? What does it mean to receive informed consent from individuals in a Tajikistani village? This short talk will delve into these and other related topics for graduate students to consider as they prepare to enter the field.

The criminal justice system in Kazakhstan is full of contradictions: Soviet-era accusatorial bias in pre-trial detention and sentencing goes hand in hand with the pro-defendant bias in closing criminal cases. This paradoxical co-existence of seemingly contradictory biases fits well within the informal power map of the criminal justice system. The major reform—reducing prison population to decrease...

Friedman’s talk focuses on China’s foreign policy interests in the post-Mao era, with particular attention to future forecasts for China and Central Asia. Will China continue to dominate economically? What are some sources of resistance to this from wider Asia? And what is Russia's response to competing Chinese influence in Central Asia?

"Gluttony discourse" plays an important role in literature. Research on this topic shows food discourse narratives can be used as a tool to describe individuality, spirituality, mood, and the social status of the protagonist. Eating processes, cooking scenes, descriptions of food, and what and how the protagonist eats can all provide source readers with clues to the writer’s intent, as these scene...

On April 12, 2017, President Nursultan Nazarbayev proposed a new program called, in English, “The Third Modernization”, but it is in reality a program for the spiritual revival of Kazakhstan. It is the 3rd stage in the national revival, the first stage being political and the second stage economic. This 3rd stage includes points on national history, sacred geography, switching to the Latin alphabe...

The literature on Soviet politics teaches us that the lack of established, democratic procedures for leadership transitions exposed the USSR to succession crises. One might expect, then, that the authoritarian regimes dominating post-communist Central Asia would be prone to disruptive leadership transitions, and yet that has not been the case. In fact, if one leaves aside the tumultuous early year...

Russia’s interests in Central Asia are similar to those of China and the United States. Today, all three powers are mostly concerned with security in the region. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian troops were withdrawn from Central Asia, with the exception of those in Tajikistan and small forces on the Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan borders with China. Both Russia and China were threatened...

On the morning of April 26, 1986, the world witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine. Dozens died of radiation poisoning, fallout contaminated half the continent, and thousands fell ill. In his lecture, Serhii Plokhii draws on new sources to lay bare the flaws of the Soviet nuclear industry, tracing the disas...

In its third year of power, Poland’s far right Law and Justice party enjoys greater public support than ever before. Where other far right parties have alienated large numbers of citizens, has Law and Justice found a way to make “fascism” acceptable again? With policies including family benefits, enforced labor laws, higher wages for the working poor, a government takeover of the courts, state pro...

Conflict between states or actors belonging to different identity groups is often accompanied by sharply divergent historical narratives about responsibility for past wrongs. Indeed, shared understanding of past events is often a constituitive element of a social identity, and these diverging narratives of the past can prevent cooperation in the present. In formal models of cooperation such as the...

Murav’s new project, Archive of Violence: Neighbors, Creatures, and the Witness Literature of the Russian Civil War, explores the strangeness of neighborly relations, enacted both in violence and reconciliation. The talk examines both kinds of relations in one of the most important witness texts of the time, Itsik Kipnis’s 1926 Yiddish novel Months and Days (Khadoshim un teg).

A panel of UW-Madison experts discusses the nature and impact of Russian influence in U.S. elections. Faculty members from the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia (CREECA) and the Elections Research Center will speak about Russian hacking efforts leading up to the 2016 presidential election, as well as what we can expect going into the 2018 midterm elections. Timeline of podcast: 0:00...

The law against ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations’ (homosexuality) has operated in Russia since 2013. It legitimized homophobia, causing a wave of increased homophobia resulting in hate crimes (bashing, abuse, homicide) against people identified as lesbians, gay men or transgender. My research sought to identify the sources of data for further statistical generalization. As a result,...

The canon of political theory rarely deals with Eastern European political thought, either as a regional category or in relation to particular thinkers. The East-West duality describes and prescribes a hermeneutic relationship that delineates a form of (subaltern) engagement with the East European other. Popescu discusses the implications of this hermeneutic relationship for how the region is conc...

The effectiveness of property rights -- and the rule of law more broadly -- is often depicted as depending primarily on rulers' "supply" of legal institutions, overlooking the crucial importance of private sector "demand" for law. In this talk, based on his recent book Property Rights in Post-Soviet Russia: Violence, Corruption, and Demand for Law, Gans-Morse unpacks the demand for law in Russia,...

This study contributes to the debate about the legacies of the Soviet era in contemporary Russian politics. Critical of treating legacies as causal factors, Sharafutdinova advances a socio-cognitive approach that brings together political leadership, legitimacy concerns and factors that constrain/enable the choices of legitimating narratives that resonate with the masses. She argues that Vladimir...

Tymofiy Mylovanov is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds a PhD from UW-Madison. He is involved with projects such as the Ukraine Decentralization Initiative. In this lecture, he talks about his work with Ukrainian economic organizations and their influence on the Ukrainian government.

International migrants navigate their way in a legal space in the countries of destination, and must comply with various laws and regulations to obtain work authorization, residence registration, and maintain authorized documentary status. Law power affects people in the home countries as well. The presentation builds upon ethnographic research in Tajikistan, and discusses recent changes in Russia...

Collaborating with Maria Petrova and Aleksey Makarin, Ruben Enikolopov tests empirically whether the spread of social media affects participation in political protests. Using the example of political protests in Russia in December 2011 they show that increased penetration of social media led to higher probability of the protests. Additional results suggest that social media has affected protest ac...

This presentation summarizes Gregg's recent research on Imperial Russian commercial law, finance, and industrial productivity. By the early twentieth century, the Imperial Russian economy still lagged behind Western European levels of development but was growing rapidly. Gregg's larger project seeks to understand how the Imperial government's industrial policies, for example restricting the creati...

This talk examines the reasons why the First World War's eastern front became the "unknown war," as Winston Churchill called it, by tracing the impact it had on German, Russian, and Polish history. Only by transcending many of the narrow boundaries of national scholarship can the shared importance of the war for the region as a whole be understood.

Wisconsin Russia Project postdoctoral fellow Alexandra Lukina speaks about Russia’s recent demographic trends, focusing on birth and death rates, international migration, and forecasts of Russia’s age-sex structure. A thorough look into the statistics enables the study of fertility rate dynamics and the effects of some pro-family programs. Dynamics of mortality rates and life expectancy at birth a...

The exile after the coup in 1948 and the fate of Czechs abroad, who sought the return of freedom and democracy to their homeland, enslaved by the Communists, are an integral part of our modern history. However, this phenomenon is still neglected and the general public has only fragmentary information about it. Researchers are still unable to agree on the intensities of individual waves of emigrati...

Marina Zaloznaya speaks about her new book, published with Cambridge University Press Studies in Law and Society Series in April 2017. Using a mix of ethnographic, survey, and comparative historical methodologies, this book offers an unprecedented insight into the corruption economies of Ukrainian and Belarusian universities, hospitals, and secondary schools. Its detailed analysis suggests that po...