The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research |
www.nceeer.org
| Current Projects |
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| Mikhail Alexseev | Migration and Inter-Minority Xenophobia in the Russian Federation | Russia | This project examines the recent rise of inter-minority hostility and violence in Russia's migrant-receiving regions. It analyzes status differentation among minorities--titular/non-titular, regional majority/minority, native/migrant, Muslim/non-Muslim, and how these distinctions affect inter-minority relations. The study will investigate these issues systematically with mass survey data among five ethnic groups in Krasnodar, Adygea, Volgograd, and Tatarstan. |
| Jessica Allina-Pisano | The Last Barbed Wire Fence in Europe: State Power and Economy in a Divided Village of Transcarpathia, 1945-2005 | Russia, Ukraine | This project examines ways in which policies primarily intended to secure state sovereignty - land reform, border surveillance, and language policy - reach beyond the political institutions to shape economic life in a Hungarian villiage divided by the Ukraine-Slovakia border. |
| Hilary Appel | The Politics of Eastern European Tax Reform | Russia, Ukraine, Serbia | This project investigates the interplay of domestic and international political factors shaping East European tax policymaking. It will fill a gap in the literature on post-Communist taxation by explicitly examining the political dimensions of tax reform. |
| Keith Brown | Evaluating Intervention: Knowledge Production and Democracy Promotion in the Western Balkans | Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo | By critically examining evaluations of different U.S. organizations' democratization activities in Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo, the project analyzes the importance of different forms of knowledge production - technical, contextual and social - in the ongoing theory and practice of US civil society promotion worldwide. |
| Melissa Caldwell | Rebuilding Communities and Saving Souls: The Political Economy of Salvation and Faith-Based Benevolence in Post-Soviet Russia | Russia | This ethnographic investigation of faith-based charities in Russia focuses on welfare programs operated by international Christian aid workers. It analyzes the ethics and practices of benevolence informing welfare work in Russia, connections between spiritual and economic salvation, and the relationships of need and obligation that are created between foreign donors and local recipients. |
| Timothy Frye | Russia and the Rule of Law under Putin | Russia | This project will survey 500 firms in eleven regions to identify social, political and economic factors shaping the legal regime in Russia. This survey repeats questions posed in 2000 and 2005 and will offer a comprehensive view of the rule of law under Putin. |
| Zvi Gitelman | Dimensions of the Holocaust in the USSR: Policies, Perceptions, Paradoxes | USSR | The Holocaust in the USSR was perceived and acted upon very differently by three groups: the Soviet government, Jewish combatants, and some citizens who turned against their state and neighbors. Using archival, memoir, and oral history evidence, I illustrate very different uses of the events by these actors and analyze their consequences. |
| Henry Hale | Succession Politics and Public Opinion in Russia 2007-08 | Russia | The researchers will survey 1,575 Russians to improve our understanding of how state-citizen relationships drive or constrain dynamics in 'hybrid-regimes', particularly during the crucial periods of leadership succession like that widely expected in Russia in 2007-2008. The survey will be conducted between Russia's parlimentary and presidential elections in 2007-2008. |
| Sarah Henderson | Civil Society in Russia: State-Society Relations in the Post-Yeltsin Era | Russia | The present study proposes to evaluate the impact of President Putin's "reforms" on Russia's civil society. Drawing primarily from survey data culled from ten regions, the study assesses how reforms have changed NGOs' legal environment, their advocacy abilities, and their abilities to provide goods and services to their constituencies. |
| Kathryn Hendley | Mobilizing Law in Russia | Russia | This project explores the role of law as a problem-solving strategy. Surveys have repeatedly confirmed Russian antipathy towards law, but have focused mostly on attitudes rather than behaviors. Through a series of focus groups and follow-up interviews, Dr. Hendley will study how disputes evolve, examining what factors motivate or discourage legal action. The results will provide a more accurate picture of Russian legal culture and how the rule of law evolves. |
| Sonia Hirt | Iron Curtains: The Proliferation of Walled-Off Spaces in Belgrade and Sofia in the Post-Communist Era | Bulgaria, Serbia | This project examines the recent proliferation of walled-off urban spaces in Belgrade and Sofia. It hypothesizes that the spread of walls is the physical manifestation of certain cultural shifts which have come to characterize Balkan society since 1990: a widespread sense of insecurity, growing individualism, mistrust of collective experiences and the decline of the collective realm. |
| Eugene Huskey | Why Do Opposition Elites Fail to Cooperate? Kyrgyzstan and the Postcommunist Experience | Kyrgyzstan | The study analyzes the impediments to cooperation by opposition elites in postcommunist Kyrgyzstan. It seeks explanations for the failure of collective action in structural factors--such as the ideational, institutional, and economic environment--as well as in governmental tactics designed to fracture or coopt the opposition. |
| Charles Ingrao | The Scholar's Initiative Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: II | Yugoslavia | Western and successor state scholars will deepen and broaden joint reseach on the Yugoslav conflicts, giving special focus to the dynamics and public representation of multicultural coexistence. Findings will be published in a new scholarly collection and single reports for public schools, posted on continuously updated SI websites, presented in public forums, and disseminated by news media throughout the successor states. |
| Grigory Ioffe | The Poorly-Illuminated Periphery of Europe: The Geography of Russia's Shrinking Population | Russia | The project will produce the improved 2025 population projection for Russia as a whole and for three case-study regions under various migration scenarios; probe attitudes to and estimates of internal migration and immigration; and uncover socio-economic implications of the ongoing population decline. |
| Debra Javeline | After Violence: Participation over Retaliation in Beslan | Russia | We examine when experiences with violence fuel greater acceptance of violence versus nonviolent participation in politics. We use surveys of 1098 victims of the Beslan school hostagetaking (completed), surveys of nonvictim residents of Beslan and Vladikavkaz (pending funding), and focus groups of active and inactive Beslan victims (pending funding). |
| Austin Jersild | Stalin's Ghost in China: Soviet Reform, American Consumerism, and Chinese Nativism, 1945-1960 | USSR/China | The exploration of cultural exhibits in the 1950s provides insight into the problem of global consumerism in the Soviet context, and the dilemmas this posed for Sino-Soviet relations and the evolution of reform in the Soviet Union. Chinese nativism in part emerged from the extraordinary encounter with the Soviet world that made up the 'Great Friendship' forged by Mao and Stalin in February 1950. |
| Emily Johnson | Private Correspondence from the Soviet GULAG: Intimate Communication and Family Relationships in a Time of Terror | USSR | This project considers the role that correspondence played in the lives of Stalin-era GULAG inmates and their relatives, the way the camp mail system functioned, and also what the letters themselves, as material traces of imperfect, censored acts of communication, reveal about the flow of information through Soviet society. |
| Eileen Kane | Russian Hajj: Imperialism and the Pilgrimage to Mecca, 1801-1917 | Azerbaijan, Russia | My research focuses on the Russian state's involvement in the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) between the 1840s and early 1900s, and Muslim responses to this involvement. I will conduct this research in archives and manuscript collections in Azerbaijan, Russia, and the UK. |
| Hiroaki Kuromiya | The Great Terror in Ukraine: A Collection of Archival Documents | Ukraine | The project is to identify, collect, annotate, and publish new archival documents that illuminate the Great Terror in Ukraine and in the USSR, and in the process, to examine Soviet foreign and domestic intelligence and their implications for international politics today. |
| Ronald Linden | Balkan Triangle: The Impact of Possible Turkish Accession on United States Relations with Bulgaria and Romania | Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey | This project will explore two related subjects: (1) the impact on Romania and Bulgaria of the EU's relations with Turkey; and (2) the direct relevance of these dynamics in US relations with these countries. The research will contain interrelated themes including the process of EU membership for all 3 countries and intertwined issues within that process, trilateral relations between the 3 countries and the resulting impacts on the relations the 3 countries have with the United States. |
| Nancy Lubin | Central Asians Take Stock, Part II: Public Opinion in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, 1993 and 2006 | Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan | This project readministers a public opinion survey conducted by Dr. Lubin in 1993, among 2000 respondents in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, to examine changes in attitudes toward democracy, economic reform, corruption, Islam, ethnic identity, environment and foreign policy, including international assistance. The survey will contribute to an understanding of Uzbek and Kazakh attitudes on the above issues, how they have eveolved over time, and what they might suggest regarding the current political developments and trends, future prospects and the reaction to US foreign policy and foreign assistance programs in Central Asia. |
| Gary Marker | Mazepa and the Preachers: Religious Discourse, Ukrainian Clerks and the Origins of the Russian National Identity | Russia, Ukraine | This is a study of Ukrainian-educated clerics who went to work in the Russian church hierarchy during the time of Peter the Great. The study focuses on issues of clerical patronage and political loyalties between the Ukrainian Hetman(Mazepa) and the Tsar, and their collective sense of identity in the wake of the Mazepa's "betrayal" of 1708. |
| Juliana Maxim | Architecture and Collectivization: The Village Museum under Communism, Bucharest, 1940-1970 | Romania | My proposal is for five months of research in Bucharest to document the history of the "Village Museum" of folk architecture (now the National Villages Museum 'Dmitrie Gusti') between 1948 and 1970. The project is the first attempt to examine how the institution's ethnographic and museographic practices were closely tied to larger cultural and economic policies of the communist regime, such as collectivization and mass-housing. |
| Eric McGlinchey | Islam and Social Mobilization in Central Asia | Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan | This study will evaluate the extent of variation in Islamic and Islamist movements in Central Asia; determine the relative degree of national and local level authoritarian rule in Central Asian countries; define the extent of the relationship between the nature of authoritarian rule and variations in Islamic and Islamist social movements in Central Asia. From an examination of these factors, the study will develop a working model for measuring Islam-centered social mobilization in Central Asia. |
| James Meyer | Turkic Worlds: Community Representation and Collective Identity in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, 1870-1914 | Russia, Georgia | Dr. Meyer will spend six months undertaking archival research in Baku, Tbilisi, Moscow, Ufa, and Kazan, allowing him to address various questions which have arisen following his most recent research in the region. These issues relate to an ongoing research project concerning community leadership politics within Muslim populations of the Russian Empire and the triangular relationship between the tsarist government, Muslim community leaders, and Muslim populations more generally. |
| Mary Neuberger | Inhaling Modernity: Tobacco Production and Consumption in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Bulgaria | Bulgaria | My book project is a cultural history of production and consumption of tobacco in Bulgaria from the 1850s-present. Throughout this period tobacco grew to play a critical role in the Bulgarian economy as well as the global tobacco industry, while its consumption was a perpetual subject of cultural imaginings and social critique. |
| Karen Petrone | The Memory of World War I and the Culture of Soviet Militarism, 1914-1945 | Russia | Inter-war public representations of World War I posed a comprehensive challenge to Russian and Soviet myths of militarism and nationalism. This project illuminates the anti-heroic, anti-war and internationalist rhetoric that challenged dominant myths about analyzing Russian and Soviet public representations of World War I in inter-war fiction, memoirs, visual arts and military histories. |
| Ethan Pollock | Without the Bania We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse | Russia | "Without the Bania We Would Perish" tells the history of the Russian bathhouse paying particular attention to its roles as a symbol of Russianness, as a sacred space, as a reflection of Russian ideas about heelth, hygiene and the body, and as a site of sexuality and heightened intimacy. |
| William Pyle | Rights to Land in Urban Russia: Causes and Consequences of Existing Patterns | Russia | By exploring recent variation across both firms and geographic space with respect to urban land ownership and access, the project will explore the causes and consequences of different patterns of land rights in a post-communist setting. |
| Cynthia A. Ruder | Red Waterway: The Moscow Canal and the Creation of Soviet Space | Russia | The Moscow Canal is a geographic feature whose inscription into the landscape changed the physical, as well as metaphorical, map of the USSR. This project explores the visually and tangibly created "Soviet" space that construction of the Moscow Canal and its corresponding Gulag camp produced. |
| Klara Sabirianova Peter | Public Sector Pay and Bribery: Measuring Corruption in Post-Soviet Republics and Southeastern Europe | Bosnia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Tajikistan, Ukraine | In this project, we develop a framework to assess the extent of bribery from reported earnings, household expenditure and asset holdings. The study offers a technique to calculate an aggregate measure of bribery at the national level and apply the technique to seven transitional economies. |
| Kathleen E. Smith | 1956: Moscow's Silenced Spring | Russia | This study explores the rise and fall of political and cultural liberalization in Russia in the pivotal year of 1956. The author analyzes 1956 as one of many cycles of reform and retreat that have characterized Russia's uneven progress towards democracy, and the lasting political impact of 1956. |
| Neven Valev | Financial Development and Economic Growth in Bulgaria | Bulgaria | This project investigates the effect of credit on economic development in Bulgaria. The institutional structure of financial markets is studied using unique data from interviews with banking officials. Statistical data are used to quantify the effect of finance on growth by sector. |
| Katherine Verdery | Unmaking and Remaking Property in Romania: Collectivization, 1949-1962 | Romania | This study is a collaborative project on Romanian collectivization. It will expand general knowledge about this subject as well as show a specific instance of property creation: the techniques of rule, behavior of Party cadres, peasant-state relations and transformed self-conceptions of villagers through which one property regime succeeded another and the specifics of property relations into the post-communist period. |
| Lisa Walker | Scientists, Medicine, and the Settling of the Soviet Far East | USSR/Russia | This project examines the role of scientists and officials in the events surrounding the emergence of Far Eastern tick-borne encephalitis in the 1930s-40s. This research will be expanded later into a book-length project on the relationship between science and official policy during Stalin-era expansion and manipulation of the physical environment in the USSR. |
| Alexei Yurchak | Global St. Petersburg: Contesting Aesthetics, Politics, and Citizenship in a Post-Socialist Metropolis | Russia | This project analyzes the dynamics of power relations in contemporary Russia through the prism of debates over the future architectural image of St. Petersburg and who has the right and power to decide that future. It examines how the city's aesthetic image and its relation to the identity of its citizens have emerged today at the center of Russia's dramatic political confrontations between authoritative state power, corporate actors, and independent civic organizations. |
| Jane Zavisca | Housing Divides: The Causes and Consequences of Housing Inequality in Russia | Russia | After the collapse of Soviet Russia the new regime transferred property rights over government housing to current occupants. This decision created the most important source of household wealth, with profound consequences for social stratification. This project undertakes new qualitative fieldwork on the consequences of housing inequality for both the political beliefs and demographic behavior of young adults in Russia. |
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| Jane Burbank | Imperial Trajectories: Law and Belonging in the Province of Kazan | Russia | My research project is a study of the qualities of justice, authority, and affiliation expressed and enacted through legal institutions in a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional province in late imperial Russia. |
| Victoria Clement | Building Civil Society in Turkmenistan, 1990-2009 | Turkmenistan | This study of grass roots local initiatives examines the condition of post-Soviet Turkmenistan, and more broadly, achievements in the areas related to education and youth. |
| Kelly Cormier | From Coping Strategies to Norms: Contracting Practices in the Kazakh Fruit and Vegetable Sector | Kazakhstan | In cooperation with USAID's Office of Economic Growth for Central Asia, Dr. Cormier will undertake the following research objectives: first, to identify what practices Kazakh vegetable growers and processors are adopting in order to cope with the uncertainty they face when operating in an 'emerging' market economy; second, to assess, over time, how coping strategies become codified customs ornorms; and third, to explore how emergent formal rules designed to govern transactions in the agricultural sector, and the property relations they create, have influenced relationships between processors and producers. The project will describe and analyze the evolution of commercial transacting in the Kazakh agricultural sector in order to inform the policy and scholarly discourses about the process of institutional change in the aftermath of rapid and braod economic and legal reforms. |
| Vjeran Pavlakovic | Red Stars, Black Shirts: The Clash of Political Symbols and Memory in Contemporary Croatia | Croatia, Serbia | This project seeks to identify the roots of political and ideological divides in Croatian society, the creation and destruction of conflicting symbols since 2000 and examine the role of collective memory in the construction of Croatia's recent history. |
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| Justyna Beinek | Writing and Editing of The Critical Guide to Witold Gambrowicz | Poland | The purpose of this project is to write and edit an English-language guidebook (with a twin Polish edition) to the oeuvre of Witold Gombrowicz (1904-69), arguably the best Polish prose writer of the 20th century. The project will be a collaborative effort between Polish Gombrowicz scholar Professor Jerzy Jarzebski from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, who will serve as the book's academic editor, and Polish colleagues from various universities; Professor Benjamin Paloff from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, who will be responsible for translation, and Professor Beinek, who will serve as the managing editor. |
| Stephen Crowley | East European Labor, Varieties of Capitalism, and the Expansion of the European Union | Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia, Poland | This project studies the increasingly "liberal" labor institutions in the new member states of the European Union, and the conflict this entails with the "social model" of most older members of the EU. Professor Crowley will collaborate with Bela Greskovits (Professor of Political Science, Head of the Department of International Relations and European Studies, Central European University, Budapest) and his CEU colleague Dorothee Bohle, on the project. |
| Diana Mincyte | Food Culture, Globalization, and Nationalism: Zeppelins in Lithuanian Imagination | Lithuania | By examining the construction of Lithuanian national food--zeppelins--at the turn of the 20th century and today, thisproject exposes how nationalism has been constructed, consumed, and experienced in the context of globalizing Eastern Europe. Professor Mincyte will collaborate on the project with Dr. Jolanta Kuznecoviene, head of the Sociology Department at Vytautas Magnus University, in collecting historical data, and Dr. Neringa Klumbyte of the Center for Social Anthropology at Vytautas Magnus University, in conducting interviews and ethnographic research. |
| Vakhtang Chikovani | Ethnography of the Former Iron Curtain: The Georgia-Turkey Border | Georgia, Turkey | This research trip is intended to collect additional materials for a study of the Georgia-Turkey border. |
| T. David Curp | The Narrow Gate? Religion, Alienation, and Solidarity at the Catholic University of Lublin in People's Poland | Poland | My project focuses on Catholic University of Lublin students in the classes of 1948, 1960, 1972, 1974, and 1980 who studied philosophy and history. My goal is to write a social history of the careers of these students to understand the evolution of Catholic culture and politics in People's Poland. |
| Alan De Young | Constructing Futures in a Transitional Period: How Kyrgyz University Students Enter and Understand Higher Education Possibilities for the World of Work | Kyrgyzstan | Post-secondary and occupational landscapes have changed since the states of Central Asia declared independence. This project is designed to follow two cohorts of secondary students as well as two cohorts of university students to understand the strategies they use. |
| Wendy Griswold | Engaging Scholars in Perspective Transformation: Introducing Transformative Learning Theory to the Altai Republic and Kazakhstan | Russia, Kazakhstan | This project will introduce transformative learning theory to researchers and scholars in the Altai Republic and Kazakhstan. This will be accomplished by sharing the results of past research conducted in the Altai Republic and by facilitating discussions with scholars in new directions for future research. This project will result in publications on cultural differences in how TLT occurs in the US and rural Central Asia. |
| Wendy Griswold | Engaging Scholars in Perspective Transformation: Introducing Transformative Learning Theory to the Altai Republic and Kazakhstan | Russia, Kazakhstan | This project will introduce transformative learning theory to researchers and scholars in the Altai Republic and Kazakhstan. This will be accomplished by sharing the results of past research conducted in the Altai Republic and by facilitating discussions with scholars in new directions for future research. This project will result in publications on cultural differences in how TLT occurs in the US and rural Central Asia. |
| Robert M. Hayden | Property and Rule in Serbia after 1990: From Socialist Self-Management to Privatized State Socialism | Serbia | This project investigates the mechanisms and effects of the continuation of the institution of "social property" in Milosevic's Serbia when the other Yugoslav republics were instead privatizing, including the effects on the present political system. The work will involve interviews with colleagues and some "bureaucratic archeology" on laws, regulations and the like. |
| Erik S. Herron | Dispute Adjucation in Azerbaijan's 2008 Presidential Election | Azerbaijan | This project directly addresses the development of the rule of law in post-Soviet societies by investigating the role of electoral commissions and the courts in resolving election disputes. During fieldwork prior to and following Azerbaijan's 2008 presidential election, I will a) collect data on election-related disputes and their resolution; b) interview politicians, members of electoral commissions, and court personnel; and c) observe the election process. |
| Jon Holtman | The Changing Politics of Eating Among Herders in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan | Kyrgyzstan | This project will investigate the changing food practices and their meanings among herders in Kyrgyzstan. |
| Angelina Ilieva | Under Western Eyes: Balkan Identities and the Western Gaze | Bulgaria | This project will investigate the complex relationship between South East European self-representations and Western scrutiny of this region. In particular, it will examine how nations internalize Western judgments as normative in their aspirations for recognition and acceptance, and how internalizing the Western gaze becomes central to the way that identities are formed and negotiated in the Balkans. |
| Eileen Kane | Russian Hajj: Imperialism and the Pilgrimage to Mecca | Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia | This research focuses in the hajjin imperial Russia (1801-1917). The project goal is two-fold: to reconstruct the role played by Russian officials in the Caucasus in facilitating the hajj from Russia and to explore muslim responses to the Russian State's intervention in the hajj. |
| Harvey Paul Manning | From Borjomi to Bonaqua: How Marketing Bottled Water from and to Georgia Reflects Real & Imagined Dimensions of Georgia's Post-Socialist Predicament | Georgia | The objective of this grant is a historical and ethnographic study of bottled water marketing under post-socialism in Georgia, including both mineral and filtered municipal waters. The research will pay special attention to the symbolic dimensions of how bottled water reflects notions of nature/culture, changing ideas about health, evaluation of the public and the private, state and market. |
| James Meernik | The Impact of the ICTY on Reconciliation in the Former Yugoslavia | Bosnia, Serbia | This project seeks to assess the ICTY's impact on conflict and cooperation among warring factions. |
| George Mitrevski | Research Guide to Libraries, Institutes and Archives in the Republic of Macedonia | Macedonia | This project is intended to offer extensive data on libraries and archival collections in the Republic of Macedonia for students, scholars, librarians and policy makers who wish to study or conduct research in the humanities or social sciences. |
| Mary Neuberger | The Smell of Smoke and Roses: Inhaling Modernity in Bulgaria | Bulgaria | This project examines the cultural history of the production and consumption of tobacco and rose oil in Bulgaria from 1878 to 1989 and how it drove a new social strata. |
| Margaret Paxson | The Story of Memory in a Kabardian Village | Russia | This grant will support preliminary research on the theme of social memory in the Northern Caucasus. |
| Irina Tomescu-Dobrow | Democratization and the Risk of Increasing Ethnic Conflict: A Comparative Analasis of the Roman Minority in Romania and Moldova | Moldova, Romania | The purpose of this project is to examine, in the context of Romania and Moldova, the link between democratization following systemic change and social tensions among ethnic minorities and the dominant population. Specifically, I want to examine whether open social conflict is seen as a viable response to prejudice and discrimination. |
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The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research
Tel: 206-441-6433
Fax: 206-753-0066
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