Looking at the post-socialist cases of Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Ukraine and Russia, this dissertation asks whether rapid development of political markets in post-socialist polities represents the anomaly of post-socialist transformation or, perhaps, it represents the normal trajectory of the evolutionary development of democratic institutions. The study has a cross-disciplinary approach, incorporating insights and analyses from different disciplines. To answer the research question in this study, a comprehensive (comparative case study) research strategy is employed. The cases were selected based on the notion that they represent a subset of a larger set of post-socialist democratic polities with very similar transformational trajectories although different in a range of historical, cultural, and geopolitical aspects. All selected cases experienced a relatively painful transformation of social, political and economic institutions. However, the success of these transformations varies across these cases. Also there is a substantial variation in the strategies of reforms, pace of changes and extent of public and elite support for the changes.Particular electoral practices and their correlation with distinct institutional and media environments are examined by combining macro-level contextual data with micro-level data. The conclusions about the degree of professionalization, the impact of the ongoing mediatization of electoral politics, the variety of campaign styles and the consequences of these changes in the nature of political campaigns for electoral democracies in post-socialist countries and worldwide are drawn.The study provides empirical support for an argument that rapid development of political markets in post-socialist polities is not an anomaly of post-socialist transformation, but, rather, is a reflection of the radical changes that are being faced by the modern democratic polities. The study suggested potential dangers caused by spread of modern political marketing techniques. This problem is even more acute in post-socialist countries than in established democracies. These countries have not inherited the robust system of democratic guarantees in the form of institutions or traditions. The effects of adaptation of modern forms of political institutions functioning could be much more unpredictable.

After the fall of communism in Eastern and Southeastern Europe in 1989 the countries that had been under socialist rule underwent a process of political, economical and social reforms and changes. These changes also had a major impact on the process of urban planning; creating a disruption in previously held planning ideas and patterns and causing a brake with the former planning system. In this context new approaches to planning arose, as did new challenges and problems, such as the phenomenon of informal and unplanned settlements. This study seeks to give some answers to the origins and causes of the development of informal settlements in Belgrade as well as inquiring how planning authorities are currently dealing with the problem in light of the large-scale new construction project Belgrade Waterfront. The data was collected using an inductive, qualitative approach through interviews, observations and by examining secondary sources on the topic. The results indicate a city still struggling with finding a functional planning system, scarred by wars, sanctions and an ongoing refugee crisis and with a government that too often prioritizes grand building projects over meeting the needs of its citizens.

Post-socialist states have increasingly adopted rural governance and resource management policies framed around the concepts of decentralization, devolution, and de-concentration in which formerly central state powers are transferred to lower, more local levels of governance. In more recent incarnations, these policies have become inspired by neo-liberal discourses of minimal government, self-rule, and personal responsibility. Increasingly, the social science literature has argued that such forms of neo-liberal governance lead to a variety of unforeseen and diverse consequences. This dissertation attempts to understand the impact of these political transformations on household vulnerability in the context of hazardous events called zud. I do this through an ethnographic study of institution-building and risk management in a pastoral district of eastern Mongolia where I explore contemporary transformations in the management of critical resources such as livestock, labor, and land. As this dissertation shows, differential mobility practices are strongly correlated to zud-based livestock mortality rates. In particular, households that are more capable of practicing otor, a kind of non-customary and irregular migration strategy, are less susceptible to the conditions that threaten herd loss. Households with a greater capacity for conducting otor are able to move greater distances, in shorter time spans, and to regions with less severe conditions, thereby escaping the possibility of facing high loss rates. Differential capacity to mitigate the risk of zud conditions also was found to be deeply affected by previously under-studied institutional transformations surrounding rights and access to livestock, labor, and land. Primarily, this study demonstrates that decentralization and other neo-liberal models of governance not only open space for significant reconfiguration of the institutional landscape in ways that support social inequality, but also subsequently lead to increased differentiation in vulnerability to disaster. Theoretically, this work contributes to critical understandings of political ecology by uncovering circulations of power through constellations of actors (human and otherwise), institutions, and meanings as well as through bio-physical landscapes. In addition, this study contributes to work in vulnerability studies by shedding light on how administrative governance, local institution-building, and property-making shift the apportionment of entitlements to produce hazardous conditions and unequal distributions of risk and vulnerability.

My research concerns how the changing geopolitical positioning of the post-Yugoslav states has impacted on the lives and prospects of students and researchers in the natural sciences. The main focus is on scientists’ experiences and self-reporting, both of the situation at present and during the nineties, when scientific operations and scientists’ lives were disrupted by war and in the case of Belgrade, Serbia, UN sanctions against science. My fieldwork is centred on participant ethnography based at an institute in Belgrade, Serbia (the Belgrade Astronomical Observatory). However, throughout the thesis I trace and make connections between numerous other institutes and networks, as well as drawing on interview material and ethnography completed with students in Belgrade and Zagreb, Croatia. I analyse in particular on the impact of the recent wars, attempted ‘democratic transition’ and the current European economic crisis. My main argument is that whilst neoliberalisation and social changes over the past forty years have created opportunities for scientists globally, these opportunities were not evenly distributed. For scientists committed to living and working in the former Yugoslav region, these changes were often, but not always experienced as a hindrance; particularly as seen through the lens of reperipheralisation, which strongly relates to the context of war and recent scientific isolation. In the introduction and first chapter of the thesis, I detail the background in light of which ethnographic insights in the later chapters make sense. I then examine how scientists’ practices and experiences reflect, relate to, shape and have been shaped by not only post-Yugoslav discursive hegemonies (chapter two), but also disciplinary changes (chapter three), local academic hierarchies and conventions (chapter four), the socialist legacy and attempted neoliberal ‘transition’ (chapters two, three, four and five), academic traditions (chapter six) and national cosmology (chapters two and six). The thesis also attempts to make an original contribution to anthropological studies of science, in particular engaging with Latour and Woolgar’s (1986) work on credibility (chapter three), literature on science and its publics (chapter five) and the historiography of science (chapter six). The thesis also draws heavily on anthropological theory from other traditions in the discipline, including Marxist anthropology and theories of hegemony (chapter two), Bourdieu’s (1984) work on education (chapters two and four), Verdery’s (1995) analysis of cultural politics under socialism (chapters three and five) and exchange theory, including Graeber’s (2011) work on debts and indebtedness (chapter six). One key theoretical claim advanced through the ethnographic material is that an anthropological study working with scientists in what Blagojević (2010) terms the ‘semiperiphery’, and where a series of violent wars had recently took place, warrants a human focus, namely on the scientists and how they collectively dealt with and coped with disruption to their work and the reorganisation of their social worlds.

This dissertation explores what it means to be post-socialist for Ismaili Muslims living in the Ishkashim district of Tajik Badakhshan. It examines the legacies of the Soviet era in people’s everyday lives, questioning how people continue to see themselves as socialist notwithstanding the putative end of state socialism. Part of what it means to be socialist has to do with expectations of what the state should provide. Tajik Ishkashimis experienced the Soviet Union as an allocative centre that helped them greatly. The post-Soviet Tajik state is unable to provide for Tajik Ishkashimis in the way of the former Soviet Union. I suggest that Tajik Ishkashimis’ religious leader, the Aga Khan, and his development institutions have gone some way toward filling this gap, making the Imam appear to be the new paternalist centre. I propose that we think through Ishkashimis’ memories of their relations with the Soviet allocative centre through what I call an “economy of grace”. Drawing on Pitt-Rivers’ theorization of “grace” as a morally-driven gift of excess that the receiver is never expected to (be able to) return, I trace the ways in which this economy of grace continues to frame Ishkashimis’ post-Soviet engagement with the Imam and his institutions, if not with the Tajik state. I then explore the moral legacies of Soviet socialism by examining how Ishkashimis try to maintain values that they associate with socialism, most notably the privileging of social relations over the market. Where both the Tajik state and the Imam’s institutions fail to provide for Tajik Ishkashimis in the way of the former Soviet state, Ishkashimis turn to labour migration. I draw on Greenberg’s (2011) and Jansen’s (2011) definition of “normal” as the predictability of daily life to demonstrate that remittances enable those living at home to maintain the rhythms and trajectories of “normal” village life. One of the effects of migration, however, is that the absence of migrants has made villages in Ishkashim no longer feel like home. It is my contention that wedding videos actualize a transnational home by giving hope that migrants who had been present in Ishkashim for when the wedding was taped might one-day return.Many hope that the Imam will create jobs in Ishkashim that will bring home migrants because they see that his development projects in Afghanistan have had this effect. Tajik Ishkashimis want their state to enable such development work on their side too, but they also worry that the work of the Imam and his institutions will force them to negotiate the norms and values of what it means to be Ishkashimi with their cross-border Afghan kin. And so, they look to the Tajik state to firmly enforce the border and keep clear the division between Tajik and Afghan Ishkashim. Ultimately, notwithstanding the incapacity of the Imam and his institutions to provide for Tajik Ishkashimis in the way of the former Soviet state, the Imam continues to garner legitimacy because he is also a spiritual leader. As such, the Imam commands a moral order, motivating people to be good so that they can achieve spiritual enlightenment. I explain that for Tajik Ishkashimis, being good is not (yet) defined by orthopraxy. Instead, Ishkashimis strive to be good in their own ways within the context of the changing socio-economic circumstances. In many ways, even though Tajik Ishkashimis’ present socio-economic situation is ostensibly worse than during the Soviet era, they now have access to the Imam in a way they never had before. Tajik Ishkashimis hold out hope for a better future, one that looks very much like their Soviet past, only better. Better because it has the Imam in it and the spiritual component of his leadership gives him the potential to satisfy them in ways that the former Soviet state could never have.

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This study compares German memory of life in the German Democratic Republic with Russian memory of life in the Soviet Union, as represented and created within fictional and autobiographical narratives of childhood, published since the collapse of each regime. The chosen texts are, to varying degrees, fictionalized and/or autobiographical. A comparison between German and Russian narratives is particularly interesting because the socialist past is remembered very differently in each country’s public discourse and culture. An examination of narratives about childhood allows for a complex relationship between the post-socialist present and the socialist past to emerge. I study the texts and their reception, in conjunction with an analysis of the dominant ways of remembering the socialist past circulating within German and Russian society and culture. This allows the analysis to go beyond a straightforward comparison between the representations of the socialist past in the two groups of texts, to also explore how those representations are interpreted and received. It also demonstrates how the surrounding memory cultures appear to be producing quite different approaches to representing memories of broadly similar socialist childhood experiences. Chapter 1 explores the role of literary texts in revealing and shaping both individual and collective memory with a review of relevant research in the field of memory studies. Chapter 2 draws on existing scholarship on post-socialist memory in German and Russian society and culture in order to identify dominant trends in the way the socialist past has been remembered and represented in the two countries since 1990/1. The analysis in Chapters 3 and 4 reveals a more detailed picture of the complexities and ambiguities inherent in looking back at childhood under socialist rule through the example of the chosen texts, and in the ways they are received by critics and by readers (in reviews posted online). I demonstrate that, in line with the surrounding memory cultures, questions of how the socialist past should be remembered are a more central concern in the German texts and their reception than in the Russian texts and reception. I show, however, that the nature of the Soviet past is often portrayed indirectly in the Russian texts and I explore how critics and readers respond to these portrayals.

This thesis represents an attempt to challenge power hierarchies infusing white Western European academic and political fields. It constitutes a project, built on decolonial critique of privileges of research, that aims at attending to local and marginalised feminist perspectives in order to reach a deeper understanding for a complex and ambivalent Serbian post-socialist reality. A critical scrutiny of previous research conducted within the field of Comparative Politics and post-socialist feminist critique of academic knowledge, has led to the identification of problematic results of unequal distributions of power within politics and the academia. Moreover, through a historical overview of the geopolitical context and the feminist legacy of the region, the importance of contextualisation and the necessity of an epistemological and ontological shift within knowledge production has further been emphasised. Lastly, with a combining approach of qualitative interviews and autoethnography, lived experiences of postsocialism and its intersections with feminism have been sought and analysed. By highlighting women’s activism in democratisation processes and the severe socio-political problems facing contemporary Serbia, these experiences problematize the hegemonic Western projections of a post-socialist transition as an elite project towards ‘progress’ and Europeanisation.

This study is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in Bor, a copper-processing town in Eastern Serbia. From the perspectives of “ordinary” people, this dissertation explores the process of post-socialist transformation through ethnography of the interconnections between the town (characterised by mono-structural economy) and the industrial company. After a prosperous period during Yugoslav socialism there was an economic, social, and symbolic decline of the copper-processing company followed by decay of the town and industry during the 1990s. This thesis captures the moment of political promise that brought a new horizon of hope for a better life and the promise of economic growth through the revival of the rundown industry. It captures the experiences of people who have had different encounters with existing attempts to revitalise and transform everyday life, in the context of the mutual revival of the company and the town. In this thesis I analyse people’s anticipations of their futures as well as the practices they invested in maintaining and realising their hopes (which I call the “work of hope”). I argue that ambivalence, which consisted of simultaneous coupling of hope with various other competing and conflicting sets of dispositions, such as risk, despair, entrapment, dismay, anxiety, frustration, and so on, was reflected in how people’s futures were imagined, conveyed, and lived towards. The first part of the dissertation focuses on how material objects, such as the renovated sites, the district heating, and pollution, appeared in my interlocutors’ work of hope and in their anticipations of futures. In parallel with this, the second part focuses on how the temporality of waiting and the work of hope played out in relation to gender, age, and generation among the people with whom I spent time. I argue that my interlocutors’ anticipations of futures and their work of hope resulted in reproduction of inequalities (in terms of gender, age, and class). I argue that in their encounter with the omnipresent industrial company that pervaded and constructed everyday lives, and through their work of hope, the state was encountered and reproduced and the social contract between the company, the town and the people was maintained. The analysis of how people in the industrial town of Bor played with and sought to reconcile ambivalence feeds into existing debates about how hope is read through, produced through, and articulated in relation to the material and social landscapes.

This study explores postsocialist representations of modernity and identity through narratives of social change collected from individuals in rural communities of Buryatia, Russia. I begin with an examination of local conceptualizations of the past, present, and future and how they are imagined in places and spaces. Drawing on 65 days of fieldwork, in-depth interviews, informal discussion, and participant-observation, I elaborate on what I am calling a confrontation with physical triggers of self in connection to place, including imaginations of the countryside and village, sacred and ritual spaces, landscapes, and the environment. I also explore how the anxieties embedded in narratives of change are connected to aspiration for the future and nostalgia for the past.