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Russian public perceptions of the war in Ukraine: a paradox of optimism amid crisis
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One of the most pronounced features of the war in Ukraine has been the heavy reliance of the Russian forces on convict-soldiers, most notably by the private military and security company (PMSC) the Wagner Group. In this essay, I explore the ethical problems with using convict-soldiers and assess how using them compares to other military arrangements, such as conscription or an all-volunteer force. Overall, I argue that the central issue with using prisoners to fight wars is their perceived expendability. To do this, I present three arguments. First, although many prisoners have been under major duress, using convict-soldiers may be somewhat preferable to using conscripts in this regard. Second, convict-soldiers are more likely to be subject to human rights abuses than other types of soldiers and this should be seen as the main problem with their use. Third, convict-soldiers’ liability to lethal force for fighting in an unjust war does not render it permissible to treat them as expendable.
The dissemination of disinformation has become a formidable weapon, with nation-states exploiting social media platforms to engineer narratives favorable to their geopolitical interests. This study delved into Russia’s orchestrated disinformation campaign, in three times periods of the 2022 Russian-Ukraine War: its incursion, its midpoint and the Ukrainian Kherson counteroffensive. This period is marked by a sophisticated blend of bot-driven strategies to mold online discourse. Utilizing a dataset derived from Twitter, the research examines how Russia leveraged automated agents to advance its political narrative, shedding light on the global implications of such digital warfare and the swift emergence of counter-narratives to thwart the disinformation campaign. This paper introduces a methodological framework that adopts a multiple-analysis model approach, initially harnessing unsupervised learning techniques, with TweetBERT for topic modeling, to dissect disinformation dissemination within the dataset. Utilizing Moral Foundation Theory and the BEND Framework, this paper dissects social-cyber interactions in maneuver warfare, thereby understanding the evolution of bot tactics employed by Russia and its counterparts within the Russian-Ukraine crisis. The findings highlight the instrumental role of bots in amplifying political narratives and manipulating public opinion, with distinct strategies in narrative and community maneuvers identified through the BEND framework. Moral Foundation Theory reveals how moral justifications were embedded in these narratives, showcasing the complexity of digital propaganda and its impact on public perception and geopolitical dynamics. The study shows how pro-Russian bots were used to foster a narrative of protection and necessity, thereby seeking to legitimize Russia’s actions in Ukraine whilst degrading both NATO and Ukraine’s actions. Simultaneously, the study explores the resilient counter-narratives of pro-Ukraine forces, revealing their strategic use of social media platforms to counteract Russian disinformation, foster global solidarity, and uphold democratic narratives. These efforts highlight the emerging role of social media as a digital battleground for narrative supremacy, where both sides leverage information warfare tactics to sway public opinion.
In this study, we shed light on the social consequences the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has had in other European countries. We argue that positive perceptions of one's intergenerational mobility are linked with political and economic stability and that the war can thus be expected to impact intergenerational mobility perceptions. We test our pre-registered hypothesis with representative survey data from three European countries, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Sweden, which were significantly affected by the ongoing war. Our results show that individuals' war-related concerns in all countries are divided into proximal and distal concerns. In turn, proximal concerns go along with greater perceived downward and less perceived upward mobility in the United Kingdom and Germany. We interpret these findings by calling for expanding the horizons of intergenerational mobility research by incorporating areas of life other than socio-economic position.
This article scrutinizes Russian state-run TV narratives over critical junctures-before the 2013 Euromaidan protests, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the periods leading up to and following the 2022 invasion-to illuminate how political agendas, historical narratives, and public perception intersect. The authors reveal the Russian political elite's strategic shaping of narratives, influencing collective memory and swaying public opinion on the Ukraine crisis. The significance of the conflict narrative and Russia's position is underscored, as reflected in the evolving structure of news broadcasts. The image of Russian leaders as capable and reliable is amplified during conflicts, while Ukrainian counterparts are persistently portrayed negatively. The media constructs an identity narrative that elevates Russian leaders and disparages Western counterparts post-crisis, mirroring geopolitical tensions. The framing of Ukraine's narrative with WWII terminology is analyzed, highlighting attempts to deflect blame onto the West. This comprehensive study elucidates the subtle complexities of media narratives and their pivotal role in geopolitics and international relations.
As the second-largest oil producer and natural gas exporter, Russia’s war with Ukraine has severely impacted the energy market. To what extent has the war influenced crude oil prices, and has it altered the long-term dynamics of oil prices? An objective analysis of the effects of the Russia–Ukraine war on the crude oil market can assist relevant entities in developing both short-term emergency strategies and long-term response plans. This study establishes an analytical framework of the event analysis method based on multiresolution causality testing (EMC). The results of the multiresolution causality testing reveal a significant one-way causality between the Russia–Ukraine war and crude oil prices. Afterward, using the event analysis based on variational mode decomposition (VMD), from October 1, 2021, to August 25, 2022, as the event window, we found that the war and its chain events caused the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil prices to increase by 41.49, a 56.33% increase. During the event window, the Russia–Ukraine war can account for 70.72% and 73.62% of the fluctuation in WTI and Brent crude oil prices, respectively. Furthermore, the war amplified oil price volatility and fundamentally altered the trend of crude oil prices. Consequently, this study proposes four recommendations: the establishment of an emergency management mechanism for the oil market, the diversification of oil and gas imports by energy-importing countries, the steady advancement of energy transformation, and the judicious use of financial instruments by enterprises to hedge risks.
Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the grounds behind Vladimir Putin’s decision were widely debated. Theories suggest several reasons, including Putin’s nostalgic dream of restoring Soviet imperial glory, Russia’s fears of NATO security threats near their borders. But another explanation may be more prosaic: Putin’s desire to restore his sagging popularity at home by attempting to repeat his 2014 “Crimea” strategy. By annexing territories in Eastern Ukraine, he may have hoped to generate a “rally-around-the flag” effect, boosting his domestic support by appealing to Russian patriotism and nationalism. To examine this thesis, Part I outlines the core concept and what is known in the literature about the size and duration of the rally-around-the flag phenomenon. Part II examines the available time-series survey evidence drawn from a variety of opinion polls in Ukraine, Europe, and Russia focusing on the first 8 months of the war to detect any rally effects associated with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Part III examines the evidence of media effects. Part IV adds robustness tests. The conclusion in Part V summarizes the main findings and discusses their broader implications for understanding the roots of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its consequences.
The Russian invasion into Ukraine prompted a large-scale population exodus. The data reveal fluctuating cross-border movements characterized by an initial outflow (February–April 2022), followed by a period of return and stabilization (May–September 2022), then a renewed outflow caused by missile attacks on civilians (October 2022–February 2023), and oscillating migrations during Spring 2023. These oscillations during Spring 2023 are possibly linked to refugees visiting Ukraine for Easter and the activation of border crossings due to the high holiday season that began in late spring. This essay reviews several data sources to address decisions of Ukrainians to relocate. It argues that immobility perspective is crucial to understand the dynamics of migration in Ukraine.
A limited number of free eprints are available here https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/TK3T7JBBYG3B8QRTNRDM/full?target=10.1080/10584609.2023.2233444
What is the role of digital media in contentious politics? On the one hand, digital media plays a central role in informing the public and organizing political movements. On the other hand, it has become a valuable tool for digital repression in authoritarian states. This study concentrates on the patterns of digital media use by pro-government actors in times of nationwide protests in autocracies. It analyzes how pro-government actors establish control over political discourse and information flow online compared to pro-opposition and neutral actors. I argue that, following the increased use of social media by opposition actors during social movements, the state will seek to establish its presence online, attempt to reach larger audiences, and endeavor to frame political issues in a beneficial light to reinforce political control. I use the cases of the 2020–21 protests in Belarus and the 2022 anti-war protests in Russia and employ text-as-data computational methods to analyze communication patterns on public Telegram channels. The results show that pro-government channels in Belarus and Russia followed the protest paradigm and framed protests as illegal, unauthorized activities that cause chaos and disorder. The pro-opposition Telegram channels in Belarus reached a larger audience than pro-state or neutral channels. In contrast, pro-government and neutral channels in Russia dominated the Telegramsphere. These contrasting patterns of Telegram channel activity and popularity suggest that the Russian pro-government online actors are more sophisticated in controlling and manipulating the communication space than Belarusian pro-state actors.
Much of the literature on patriotic sentiment in post-Soviet Russia leans on public opinion surveys administered exclusively to Russian citizens. Absent a comparison group, such evidence, while helpful, can leave one adrift in trying to assess the meaning of a particular polling result. Drawing on multiple waves of from the International Social Survey Program and the World Values Survey, we benchmark Russians’ patriotic sentiment to that of citizens in a diverse group of middle- and high-income countries. This exercise highlights that while Russians are not unusual in the degree to which they have a benign attachment to and/or pride in their country, they stand out for espousing a patriotism that has remained consistently blind and militant since at least the mid-1990s. We speculate as to the underlying cause and highlight a potential consequence: the nature of Russian patriotism has lowered the cost to the Russian leadership of military aggression.
This article offers a qualitative analysis of how, by adopting identity-related discourses whose meanings resonate within a given culture, Russian state propaganda strives to bolster “the truth status” of its Ukraine war claims. These discourses, we argue, have long historical lineages and thus are expected to be familiar to audiences. We identify three such discourses common in many contexts but with specific resonances in Russia, those of colonialism/decolonization, imperialism, and the imaginary West. The article demonstrates that these same discourses also inform war-related coverage in Russophone oppositional media. Russian state-affiliated and oppositional actors further share “floating signifiers,” particularly “the Russian people,” “historical Russia,” “the Russian world,” “Ukraine,” “fascism/Nazism,” and “genocide,” while according them radically different meanings. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of studying how state propaganda works at the level of discourses, and the acutely dialogical processes by which disinformation and counter-disinformation efforts are produced and consumed.
In May 2022, Finland and Sweden both announced that they had decided to apply for membership in NATO. This was a dramatic shift in both countries’ foreign and security policies, but a logical consequence of their European Union membership and close partnership with NATO in the post–Cold War era. For both Finland and Sweden, the key motivation for joining NATO was the need for greater strategic stability in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The swift decisions to cast aside their traditional military nonalignment cannot be understood without considering the strong emotional response in public opinion to Russia’s unprovoked war.
Background We examined the human toll and subsequent humanitarian crisis resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on 24 February 2022.
Method We extracted and analysed data resulting from Russian military attacks on Ukrainians between 24 February and 4 August 2022. The data tracked direct deaths and injuries, damage to healthcare infrastructure and the impact on health, the destruction of residences, infrastructure, communication systems, and utility services – all of which disrupted the lives of Ukrainians.
Results As of 4 August 2022, 5552 civilians were killed outright and 8513 injured in Ukraine as a result of Russian attacks. Local officials estimate as many as 24 328 people were also killed in mass atrocities, with Mariupol being the largest (n=22 000) such example. Aside from wide swaths of homes, schools, roads, and bridges destroyed, hospitals and health facilities from 21 cities across Ukraine came under attack. The disruption to water, gas, electricity, and internet services also extended to affect supplies of medications and other supplies owing to destroyed facilities or production that ceased due to the war. The data also show that Ukraine saw an increase in cases of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and Coronavirus (COVID-19).
Conclusions The 2022 Russia-Ukraine War not only resulted in deaths and injuries but also impacted the lives and safety of Ukrainians through destruction of healthcare facilities and disrupted delivery of healthcare and supplies. The war is an ongoing humanitarian crisis given the continuing destruction of infrastructure and services that directly impact the well-being of human lives. The devastation, trauma and human cost of war will impact generations of Ukrainians to come.
This article examines Russian citizens’ support for and participation in civic activism today, nearly three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Specifically, we consider how activism has evolved over time in two key issue sectors—environmentalism and women’s rights. We draw on a recent nationally representative survey that challenges existing stereotypes of Russians as apathetic and/or fearful of participating in civic activism, showing, to the contrary, that Russians are willing and interested in engaging in public activities. Data from field interviews with environmental and feminist activists, along with the authors’ past twenty-five years of research in these areas of Russian civic activism, allow us to identify an ongoing shift from professionalization and formalization of NGOs in the 1990s and early 2000s, to informal organizing, often assisted by social media platforms, today. We argue that the three major social and political drivers of this change in Russian civic activism are the contraction of political freedoms, the decline in foreign funding, and the availability of web-based communication and fundraising technologies.
Authoritarian regimes attempt to control the circulation of political information. Scholars have identified many mechanisms through which actors can use broadcast and digital media to challenge or sustain authoritarian rule. However, while contemporary media environments are characterised by the integration of older and newer forms of communication, little is known about how authoritarian regimes use different media simultaneously to shape citizens’ perceptions. In order to address this issue, this study relies on focus groups and investigates Russian TV viewers’ cross-media repertoires and their reception of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It argues that some citizens evaluate state-aligned television narratives as more credible when they are reinforced by similar narratives in digital media. Citizens’ reactions to this synchronisation are predicated on their type of media use. For not very active news consumers, the reliance on digital media can verify the regime’s narratives in television news. Others can escape the synchronisation effect by actively searching online for additional information or not using digital media for news. These findings show how authoritarian regimes can utilise the advantages of hybrid media systems to shape citizens’ perceptions and specify the conditions under which citizens can escape the effects of the regime’s simultaneous use of different media.
This monograph provides a novel long-term approach to the role of Russia’s imperial legacies in its interactions with the former Soviet space. It develops ‘Hybrid Exceptionalism’ as a critical conceptual tool aimed at uncovering the great power’s self-positioning between ‘East’ and ‘West’, and its hierarchical claims over subalterns situated in both civilizational imaginaries. It explores how, in the Tsarist, Soviet, and contemporary eras, distinct civilizational spaces were created, and maintained, through narratives and practices emanating from Russia’s ambiguous relationship with Western modernity, and its part-identification with a subordinated ‘Orient’. The Romanov Empire’s struggles with ‘Russianness’, the USSR’s Marxism-Leninism, and contemporary Russia’s combination of feigned liberal and civilizational discourses are explored as the basis of a series of successive civilising missions, through an interdisciplinary engagement with official discourses, scholarship, and the arts. The book concludes with an exploration of contemporary policy implications for the West, and the former Soviet states themselves.
Purpose
In this study, we investigate whether individuals’ BMI categories are associated with being dissatisfied with one’s life, how this association is affected by the social comparison that individuals make, and what the role of the overall BMI levels in this process is.
Methods
We use data for 21,577 men and 27,415 women, collected in 2016 by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, from 34 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia. To understand the moderating effect of contextual environment, we use multilevel mixed effect logistic regression models and data for national, regional, and cohort-specific BMI levels.
Result
We find that the association of BMI and dissatisfaction with life differs by gender, with overweight men being less likely to be dissatisfied with life than men with normal weight and obese women being more likely to be dissatisfied with life compared to women with normal weight. For contextual effects, we find that obese women in regions with low BMI levels are more likely to be dissatisfied with life. The effect of obesity on female life dissatisfaction is not observed in regions with high BMI levels. As for men, regional BMI levels affect the levels of life dissatisfaction but only for underweight men.
Conclusions
Our study adds additional nuance to the quality-of-life research by showing that the association between BMI and decreased life satisfaction is, at least partially, moderated by the contextual environment, and that the character of these effects differs by gender.
Why are women less likely to engage with politics as compared to men? I explore whether women avoid politics because of their lower levels of tolerance for conflict and disagreement. Men are more likely to say they enjoy a lively political argument, while women are more conflict avoidant. These differences in people’s orientations toward conflict are thought to contribute to gender gaps in political interest and engagement. I explore this using survey responses to a module of the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. I find that people’s positive reactions to conflict better explain the decision to engage in politics than negative reactions to disagreements. While women report higher levels of conflict avoidance than men, gender gaps in political engagement cannot be explained by women’s greater aversion to conflict. Instead, gender gaps are better understood as a product of men’s comparatively higher levels of enjoyment of arguments and disagreements.
This paper seeks to enhance memory studies' conceptual toolkit by reconsidering established perspectives on “memory politics.” The paper theorizes various modes of temporal connectivity cultivated through politicized references to a shared past. Our empirical case is focused on a collection of roughly 5.000 recent articles about the war in Ukraine from major Russian state-aligned news outlets. We analyze and typologize the narrative and rhetorical gestures by which these articles make the Soviet “Great Patriotic War” and the post-Soviet “special military operation” speak to one another, both prior to and following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The analysis demonstrates that even in contemporary Russia's tightly controlled, propagandistic mass media ecology, politicized uses of memory foster diverse temporal structures within the propaganda narratives. We present a typology of these relations, mapping the distinct modes and intensities of connections between past and present. At one end of the spectrum, we identify a mode of temporal organization that presents past events and figures as fully detached from the present, available solely for historiographic reflection. At the other end, we find narratives that entirely collapse historical distance, addressing contemporary audiences as participants in a timeless war drama, with stakes that transcend any specific historical period. We propose that the presented typology may be applicable beyond our specific case. As a tool for analyzing the hitherto understudied organization of time in politicized articulations of memory, it could be employed in various cultural and political contexts. Furthermore, our approach can serve as a foundation for future research into the actual persuasive and affective impact that specific temporal modalities may have on their target audiences.
Since Lasswell, propaganda has been considered one of three chief implements of warfare, along with military and economic pressure. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revives public and scholarly interest in war propaganda. The Russian political leader frames the war as an imperial war. The Ukrainian political leader frames it as a war of national liberation. The discursive battle thus complements the military combat. The outcome of the discursive combat depends on the effectiveness of propaganda deployed by the parties involved. Propaganda effectiveness is the propagation of war-related messages stated by political leaders through various media with no or few distortions. The effectiveness of propaganda is compared (1) across countries, with a particular focus on two belligerents, Russia and Ukraine, (2) in the function of the medium (mass media, digital media), and (iii) using two different methods (content analysis and survey research). Data were collected during the first year of the large-scale invasion (February 2022 to February 2023). Survey data allowed measuring the degree of the target audience’s agreement with key propagated messages.
At the moment, the first phase of the military confrontation between Russia and Ukraine, which began in February 2022, is reaching its logical end: A certain front line has already been established and the economic state in which the countries are is becoming clearer. That is why the evaluation and forecasting of the military, economic and demographic impact of the war on other countries become relevant. This work examines what losses Russia received due to its actions. In the article, the authors examine the issue of the impact of the war in Ukraine on the Russian economy, as well as a retrospective forecast of the impact of Russia’s military operations on its national economy. Attention is focused on military and demographic aspects, as well as on the results of the impact of various types of sanctions. The main method that was used in the work can be considered modelling; however, in addition to it, analysis, historical method, graphic and others were also used. The practical results of the analysis showed that the government of the Russian Federation announced the transition to a command mobilisation economy, and today its first consequences are already visible in the form of rising prices and devaluation of the national currency. In addition, it was shown that despite the large number of sanctions imposed on Russia, the country has not yet felt the full consequences. The issue of how the defence economy of the Russian Federation is developing, how the military budget of Russia has changed over the past 11 years, and how the war in Ukraine affected the demographic situation has been examined. In the section on the impact of the war on the economy of the Russian Federation, it is shown that modernised production and industries will suffer the most from such actions, which will lead to a powerful technological lag. The article brings new knowledge for understanding the current functioning of the Russian economy and in the near future, as well as for making assessments of the possible future course of the war.
JEL: H56, N4, J11, R11
The vast changes in family life—the rise of single, same-sex, and two-paycheck parents—have often been blamed for declining morality and unhappy children. Drawing upon pioneering research with the children of the gender revolution, Kathleen Gerson reveals that it is not a lack of “family values,” but rigid social and economic forces that make it difficult to live out those values. In the controversial public debate over modern American families, The Unfinished Revolution takes a measured approach, looking at the young adults who grew up in the tumultuous post-feminist period. Despite the entrance of women into the workforce and the blurring of once clearly defined gender boundaries, men and women live in a world where the demands of balancing parenting and work, autonomy and commitment, time and money are left largely unresolved. Gerson finds that while an overwhelming majority of young men and women see an egalitarian balance within committed relationships as the ideal, today's social and economic realities remain based on traditional-and now obsolete-distinctions between breadwinning and caretaking. In this equity vacuum, men and women develop conflicting strategies, with women stressing self-reliance and men seeking a new traditionalism. With compassion for all perspectives, Gerson argues that whether one decides to give in to traditionally imbalanced relationships or to avoid marriage completely, these approaches are second-best responses, not personal preferences or inherent attributes, and they will shift if new options can be created to help people achieve their egalitarian aspirations. The Unfinished Revolution makes clear recommendations for the kinds of workplace and community changes that would best bring about a more egalitarian family life—a new flexibility at work and at home that benefits families, encourages a thriving economy, and helps women and men integrate love and work.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine set the wheels in motion for the Global Food Crisis of 2022. As epicenters of world food, fertilizer, cooking oil, and gas production, the removal of Russian and Ukrainian exports created an enormous supply shock sending food prices soaring. The least resilient and food insecure nations were hit the hardest. The rise in prices prompted an increase in alternative sources of supply, but only after several difficult months. The gap was partially filled by exhausting existing food and cash reserves as well as extending credit. On the diplomatic front, the signing of the BSGI also proved instrumental by allowing at least a portion of blockaded food supplies to be exported. For its part, the US government response was dramatic: extending aid, resources, and credit. That said, with many resources exhausted, the risk of a future food crisis remains concerning. Food supply shocks are best understood through a pricing perspective and resiliency efforts best assessed by their ability to place downward pressure on food prices. The Food Supply Shock model provides a useful tool for planners to understand, shape and assess their actions. Rather than being proscriptive, planners can assess actions and activities based on how they can address the pricing issue, and thus open an array of creative and non-standard solutions. Traditionally, USG efforts have relied on the Diplomatic and Development aspects of foreign policy to address food insecurity. This is understandable given the nature of the task to build resiliency in fragile states. That said, Defense has an important and underappreciated role in preparing for the next food supply shock. It’s unique suite of defense stability tasks can provide significant downward pressure on food prices.
This article reviews the literature on the multifaceted consequences of historical conflict. We revisit three key topics, which are especially relevant for the current Ukrainian context. 1) The negative long-term impact of bombing campaigns and political repression against civilians. 2) The interplay between forced migration, refugees, and war. 3) The role of gender and war, with a special focus on sex ratios and conflict-related sexual violence. We conclude with an empirical investigation of the Russian war against Ukraine, including aforementioned historical determinants such as ethnic populations, historical political repression and voting outcomes.
This article attempts to explore three illiberal discursive practices (metaphysical state, right post-colonialism, and Orthodox pan-Slavism) that structure Putin's ideological course and help to understand why justifications of Russia's invasion of Ukraine sound logical in Russian discourse. It argues that throughout the 1990s illiberal grassroots organizations popularized these discursive practices of the Soviet right-wing intelligentsia, engaged large masses in their projects, recruited members of Putin's elites as followers, and were partially absorbed by the administration. My interviews with the representatives of the illiberal civic movement and Putin’s administration indicate that grassroots organizations successfully delivered their ideological modus operandi to the post-Yeltsin ruling class. Hence, an acute resemblance of the illiberal grassroots movement’s discursive practices with those of the Kremlin is hardly likely to be accidental. Putin and his allies engaged with this preexisting illiberal civil society and ultimately drew on its ideas and tapped into its networks for support.
This article discusses the representation of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, beginning in February 2022, in Ukrainian official discourse, media, and mass culture. A new stage in the war with Russia that has been ongoing since 2014, the invasion prompted a search for a new political and cultural vocabulary. If the Ukrainian state at first tended to use familiar Soviet models, mass culture responded with powerful memes, slogans, and images that mobilized the public in defence of Ukraine. The Zelens′kyi administration soon recognized the importance of modern mass culture and switched to borrowing successful symbols from it. In some cases, state institutions put potentially popular materials on social media to see whether they would work well and then re-appropriated them once they entered popular culture. Ultimately, it has been the test of popular culture that has determined the success or failure of official rhetoric.
The unprovoked and brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia on 24 February 2022 is imposing a terrible human cost. In this paper, we use the National Institute Global Econometric Model (NiGEM) to quantify the impact of the war on the global economy. The war represents a massive cost, equivalent to 1 per cent of global GDP in 2022, or about $1.5 trillion valued at Purchasing Power Parity exchange rates (PPP), compared to our GDP forecast made at the beginning of 2022. Europe is the region affected most, given trade links its proximity to Ukraine and Russia and its reliance on energy and food supplies from those countries. GDP in Europe is expected to shrink by more than 1 per cent in 2022 compared with our forecast at the beginning of 2022. In Western Europe, Germany will be worst affected, followed by France and Italy. GDP in ‘Developing Europe’, where Ukraine is the largest representative, is expected to shrink by 30 per cent. The war will also add about 2 per cent to global inflation in 2022 and 1 per cent in 2023, compared with NIESR’s inflation projection at the beginning of 2022.
Transnational actors with Russian origins have recently appeared on the global stage and become influential in world politics. In this article we revisit the theoretical debate about subgroups within the Russian diaspora such as ‘Russian compatriots’, representatives of the ‘Russian world’ (Russkii mir) and so-called ‘Global Russians’. Filling a gap in the scholarly analysis, we define Global Russians as individuals who self-identify with Russian civilisation and actively engage in Russian political, social or cultural affairs while living abroad and contributing to business, academic and cultural life at a global level.
Human anthropometric traits, while significantly determined by genetic factors, are also affected by an individual’s early life environment. An adult’s body height is a valid indicator of their living conditions in childhood. Parental education has been shown to be one of the key covariates of individuals’ health and height, both in childhood and adulthood. Parental functional literacy has been demonstrated to be another important determinant of child health, but this has largely been overlooked in studies on height. The objective of this study was to analyse the associations between parents’ education, their functional literacy and their children’s adult body height. The study used data for 39,240 individuals from the 2016 wave of the nationally representative Life in Transition Survey (LITS) conducted in 34 countries in Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. Using linear and Poisson models, regression adjustment treatment estimators and multilevel mixed-effects linear regressions, the study analysed the links between mother’s and father’s educational attainment, parental functional literacy, measured by the number of books in the childhood home, and children’s adult height. The models also included other individual and contextual covariates of height. The results demonstrated that mother’s educational attainment and parental functional literacy have independent associations with children’s adult body height. Sufficient literacy skills of the parent may have a positive effect on children’s growth even if parental education is low. These associations remained significant across time. The study also provides evidence of a widening of the height gap for men born in the period just before and after systemic transition in post-socialist societies, which may suggest an increase in social differences in early living standards.
In the past five years, the funding environment for nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and social projects in Russia has changed dramatically. The most publicised developments involve government actions to restrict funding by Western donors. Less documented has been the transformation of the indigenous funding environment for civil society and how demand-driven strategies may better support civil society development in Russia than sceptics assume. Using evidence gathered in 2016–2018, we provide an overview of how NGOs targeted as foreign agent organisations responded to their status, how funding opportunities for NGOs in Russia have changed, and how Russian organisations are sustaining themselves financially.
This paper argues that the instrumental reference to Russian ‘compatriots’ in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 served as a discursive framing to justify contradictions in Russian approaches to state sovereignty to an international audience. Contrary to teleological readings of Russian foreign policy, however, the paper argues that while Russian diaspora policies have been tapped into, the iterative and partially contradictory development thereof on a governmental level suggests that these were not the blueprint for a revisionist foreign policy by design. It contextualizes the evolution of Russian diaspora policies against the background of the evolution of the wider ‘Russian World’ conception and shows how the discourse about the protection of ‘compatriots’ was contextual and has translated into geopolitical boundary-making at a time when relations between Russia and the West deteriorated.
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
Logistic regression estimates do not behave like linear regression estimates in one important respect: They are affected by omitted variables, even when these variables are unrelated to the independent variables in the model. This fact has important implications that have gone largely unnoticed by sociologists. Importantly, we cannot straightforwardly interpret log-odds ratios or odds ratios as effect measures, because they also reflect the degree of unobserved heterogeneity in the model. In addition, we cannot compare log-odds ratios or odds ratios for similar models across groups, samples, or time points, or across models with different independent variables in a sample. This article discusses these problems and possible ways of overcoming them.
Cultivation theory predicts that the more time a person spends watching television and being immersed in this mediated world, the more likely that person's views about reality will reflect what is seen on television. Like many media effects studies, cultivation analyses typically generate small effect sizes. Cultivation is a continual and dynamic process, not a unidirectional flow of influence from television to viewers. In many countries today television has changed and is becoming more similar to the US commercial model. Continuing research in the cultivation tradition must begin to assess the more general content of the Internet, specifically to determine if those who spend time with computers, using it as a primary entertainment venue, come to view the world in much the same way as they see it in the messages they receive on their computers.
The twentieth century gave rise to profound changes in traditional sex roles. This study reveals how modernization has changed cultural attitudes towards gender equality and analyzes the political consequences. It systematically compares attitudes towards gender equality worldwide, comparing almost 70 nations, ranging from rich to poor, agrarian to postindustrial. This volume is essential reading to gain a better understanding of issues in comparative politics, public opinion, political behavior, development and sociology. © Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris 2003 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
This paper investigates empirically the link between the prospects of upward mobility and preferences for redistribution using data for a large number of countries from the Life in Transition Survey. The survey is unique in that it provides a detailed account of expected future mobility, and makes it possible to differentiate respondents by their degree of risk aversion – both key pillars of the POUM model. The results from the pooled sample, and those for the EU Member States confirm the theoretical predictions of Benabou and Ok (2001) - individuals’ expectations of upward mobility reduce their preference for redistribution, but only when the degree of risk aversion is low. The POUM hypothesis is not borne out by the data in the non-EU countries.
In this study, the “rally effect”—the propensity for the American public to put aside political differences and support the president during international crises—is measured by considering the changes in presidential popularity following all 193 Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) between 1933 and 1992 as identified by the Correlates of War project. Summary analyses find minor, statistically insignificant rallies associated with uses of force, although sizable rallies are associated with particular subcategories of military crises. However, larger rallies are associated with the United States as both revisionist and originator of the dispute, with the initiation of a full interstate war, and with prominent headline placement in the New York Times. Regression analyses indicate that rallies are more likely when they are associated with White House statements and bipartisan support for the administration's policies. Findings suggest that the size and appearance of a rally depends primarily on how the crisis is presented to the public in terms of media coverage, bipartisan support, and White House spin.