The Russian implementation of the "energy weapon" plays an important role in understanding the complex Eurasian political dynamism that exists and influences relationships. Endowed with a greater amount of gas supplies, Russia has utilized its natural monopoly in an endeavor to maneuver its political objectives within the international scene. Its drive to espouse the "energy weapon" envelopes itself within Russia’s turbulent past and desire to regain political prominence experienced throughout much of the twentieth century. Thus, studying Russian motivations in employing gas resources allows political scientists, statespersons and other government intellectuals to better understand the economic backdrop affecting Eurasian affairs and potentially formulate strategic policy that would garner net positive outcomes with little to no negative externalities. Studying such information would prove to enhance relations, positively or negatively, for Ukrainian, Russian, and European authorities when conducting domestic and foreign policy.

Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation has struggled to construct a new foreign policy paradigm in a world that is no longer bipolar. Instead of the Cold War era arms stockpiles, Moscow has signed multiple Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START), and instead of physically taking over neighboring territories, increasing diplomacy and economic incentives have become Moscow’s primary tool to garner and maintain influence in its near abroad. Soft power initiatives, that can all roughly fit into a foreign aid model, from the Russian Federation to the near abroad come in different forms: oil subsidies, aid in kind, and direct financial investment. The Russian Federation has used all three of these strategies in Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union in an attempt to keep the country in its sphere of influence. The use of foreign aid, be it oil subsides, aid in kind, or direct financial aid, all work towards the same goal of promoting Russian policies and interests in the near abroad. Ukraine, with its unique political, cultural and geographical importance, demonstrates the new struggle between Russia and the West. The struggle’s main actors are the Russian Federation against the eastern half of NATO and the EU, and the conclusion is unclear. Foreign aid and soft power are now playing a critical role in the outcome.

<p>The purpose of the study was to examine teachers perceptions of the impact of societal changes on teacher collaboration in schools within the period of independence of Ukraine (1991 2005). This study provided a description of teacher experiences in a context of large-scale philosophical, ideological, social, political, and economic changes of the post-Soviet era, and the teachers interpretation of the impact of related changes upon teacher collaboration in Ukrainian schools. Research questions were divided into two subgroups: first, questions inquiring into teachers perceptions of the nature of post-Soviet societal changes; and second, questions regarding the nature, external and internal impacts on teacher collaboration. Utilizing constructive postmodernism framework, this research examined teacher collaboration through micropolitical and cultural perspectives.</p> <p>This study adopted a naturalistic orientation, within which an interpretive constructivist approach to methodology prompted the use of qualitative methods of inquiry. The data collection techniques of document analysis, focus group interviews and individual interviews were utilized. Document analysis involved review of national and local acts, decrees, policies, and procedures that pertained to teacher collaboration issued during the period of 1991-2005. The participants in this study were elementary or secondary school teachers in the city of Chernivtsi, Ukraine who had been in the teaching profession within the education system of Ukraine during the period of time from 1991 to 2005. In total, fifty-five teachers from eight schools participated in eight focus group interviews and fifteen individual interviews. Documentary data and participants responses were analyzed according to the research questions and recurring themes with the help of ATLAS.ti qualitative data analysis software.</P> <p>The findings revealed the ongoing struggle between the forces of modernity and postmodernity in post-Soviet Ukrainian society. Gains of deideologization and freedoms of conscience, speech, and religion were counteracted by economic decline, political instability, and social insecurity. Societal transformations were seen as having direct impact on the system of education, resulting in a difficult transition period from the old Soviet to the new Ukrainian system of education.</p> <p>It was found that collaboration among teachers in schools was susceptible to transformations at the macro (societal), as well as micro (school) levels. Macro transformations affected the nature of teacher collaboration in a direct way through changing societal realities, while content and format were usually influenced indirectly through the impact on school structures, reforms and policies, school culture, and micropolitical interactions among professionals.</p> <p>Findings affirmed that in the times of uncertainty and radical changes, personal aspects of collaboration tend to gain more significance than the professional ones. Material welfare, spirituality and morale, social security, societal attitudes, social relationships, and shift in the systems of values and beliefs were found exerting significant impact on teacher collaboration. It was pointed out that discourse on collaboration required a balanced representation of individualistic and collectivistic perspectives. It was concluded that the development of collaborative cultures in Ukrainian schools needed to be a two-fold process, involving both instrumental shaping on the part of teachers and administrators and the presence of societal conditions conducive to collaborative relationships. A number of implications from the findings were derived for theory, practice, policy, further research, and methodology. </P>

This study aimed to describe the life standard in the post-Soviet context taking the Republic of Adygeya, one of the poorest districts of Post-Soviet Russia, as an example. The applicability of the European approach to the life standard (quality of life) was also in question. The survey in Adygeya showed that life standard research is applicable in the post-Soviet context. However, modifications are necessary and not all concepts are comparable to the world outside the ex-Soviet region. The descriptive chapters on the case of Adygeya include income, economic life, settlement, necessities and ownership, the failure of the systems of education and heath, democracy and citizens as well as the general evaluation of the quality of life and satisfaction.

This thesis analyzes the role of political leadership in post-Soviet democratic transition in Kyrgyzstan by looking at the case of Askar Akaev. Despite the fact that a variety of components can be considered as relevant for the democratic transition process in Kyrgyzstan, due to the highly personalistic nature of Kyrgyz politics, the issue of political leadership needs to be addressed for this purpose. In that sense, the converse trajectories of Kyrgyz democratization (an initial democratic leap till mid-1990s which attracted world-wide attention and made Kyrgyzstan a promising candidate for democratization, afterward a democratic reversion and finally a slip to authoritarianism) correspond to the three stages in Akaev&amp / #8217 / s political leadership style (his emergence as a reform-minded politician, his initial liberal policies in political and economic spheres and his gradual reversion to authoritarianism). As a result, when Askar Akaev was ousted from his office in March 2005 by a public protest, Kyrgyzstan was far away from its world-wide accepted initial trajectory to democracy and became more similar to other authoritarian Central Asian Republics

This thesis analyzes the political economy of oil in the post-Soviet Kazakhstan. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, which is one of the newly independent states of the former Soviet geography, became very popular in the international arena with its hydrocarbon riches. There have been discussions in the scholarly and international political agendas that the country will suffer from the so called &ldquo / curse&rdquo / that is associated with the producing states. This dissertation looks at the political, economic and social dynamics associated with the post-Soviet environment in Kazakhstan and the impact of oil revenues on each one of those domains. It discusses Kazakhstan&rsquo / s political economy by engaging three relevant literatures on the issue. To this end first it is argued that the rentier state model which has been developed based on the experiences of other oil producing states is useful to understand the political economy of post-Soviet Kazakhstan, however it fails to explain its dynamics fully. Therefore, the dissertation engages with post-Soviet transformation as well as critical geopolitics literatures to overcome some of the gaps in the rentier state model. It has been argued that while analyzing the political economy of oil in Kazakhstan it is possible to identify three major trends with regard to the impact of oil revenues on the post-Soviet environment. The first one of those post Soviet trends is the consolidation of pre-existing institutions and structures. Second one is the restructuring of pre-existing institutions and third one is the creation of new institutions that was not present during the Soviet environment.

This thesis analyzes women&rsquo / s status in the Russian Federation in the period after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin&rsquo / s reforms radically changed the quality of political, economical and social aspects of Russian life. Yeltsin&rsquo / s period together with the policies of the subsequent governments proved to be mostly detrimental to women&acute / s status in the country. Women have become the ones who suffered most from the instability and lawlessness of the transition period. This study discusses increasing gender inequality and gender asymmetry in economy, politics and in social realms in post-Soviet Russia and examines the transformation of women&rsquo / s role and status in this period

During August 2012 the issues of women's rights in Russia attracted attention of the U.S. newspapers, which was an unusual occurrence for this unprivileged region in feminist theorizing. In my thesis I explore the rhetoric around the Pussy Riot trial and verdict. I argue that international media rendered the protest metonymically, thereby reducing its political content to human rights and Cold War frames. I explore the usage of historical references in the narratives, based on these paradigms. The oppressiveness of the Russian government is constructed through Cold War rhetoric by references to Stalinism, which masks the neoliberal content of this case. The confrontation is represented as a clash of cultures based on the contrast between democracy and oppressive regimes, with Pussy Riot as martyrs for Western values and Putin as an Oriental dictator. I argue that this rhetoric has troubling implications for social activism, that democracy could be only achieved through non-violent and individualist symbolic activism which relies on the Western standards. The second part of my thesis analyzes how social movements in the U.S. and Russia interact with each other and influence each other's tactics through interaction with media representations of the Pussy Riot trial and dominant narratives regarding activism. My support for this argument comes from an analysis of the U.S. and Russian movements' responses to the Pussy Riot trial. Embracing a complex combination of political meanings, these events were significantly determined by prolific mass media coverage and mediated interaction between activist groups. / text

This dissertation examines three phases in post-Cold War relations between Turkey and the ex-Soviet Turkic republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus, not from the macro-level perspective of political and economic protocols and accords agreed by state actors, which has been ably outlined by other scholars, but rather from the micro-level perspective of efforts pursued on a less formal plane to promote linguistic rapprochement among the disparate Turkic peoples. The actors in this unfolding drama were an shifting collective of interested individuals, composed predominantly of linguists and language professionals, who were readily classifiable neither as official representatives of their respective nations, nor solely as invested individuals acting in their own interests, but rather operated at the meso level and comprised, I would argue, a “community of practice” dedicated to uniting the Turkic peoples linguistically, socioculturally, and perhaps even geopolitically under the rubric of an emergent supranational “Turkic world.” In exploring the shifting sands of supranational relations in the post-Soviet Turkic world through the lens of linguistic rapprochement, I focus, in particular, on two ostensibly discrete language ideological debates--the first centered around a series of early Turkic linguistic congresses held during the initial phase of post-Soviet Turkic relations that focused on the creation of a common Turkic alphabet (ortak alfabe) and Turkic lingua franca (ortak dil), and the second emerging during the third phase of relations among the Turkic peoples that focused on defending the Turkish alphabet from pernicious “outside” influence, where “outside” was largely identified as “the West” yet intersected in interesting, ways with the “outside Turks” (dış Türkler) of Central Asia and the Caucasus. In addition, I reconstruct the transitional “bridge” between the first and third phases of Turkic relations by also examining the dimensions of ongoing discussion and debate over issues of language, orthography, and identity both in Turkey and in the emergent Turkic world that, although more diffuse and less formal by nature than the two debates described above nonetheless, I argue, constitute two additional language ideological debates which together define the second stage of relations among the Turkic peoples in the post-Cold War era. / text

This research investigates language use in Linguistic Landscapes (LLs) of an urban center of post-Soviet eastern Ukraine The major focus is on how the signs represent linguistic, social and ideological phenomena in the context of competing local, national, and global language ideologies with Ukrainian, Russian and English in Cyrillic and Roman scripts. More than 100 pictures of public signs were selected and analyzed, from more than one thousand photographs.Detailed analyses of the signs show that the `one state - one language' official language policy is not effective in the predominantly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine: the signs frequently use Russian, and blend in Ukrainian. There were revealing differences between establishment categories. Bank signs were almost all in Ukrainian, because they are government regulated. In contrast, local clothing store signs used Russian, along with English and European languages to convey `modernity', `prestige' and `high fashion'; other establishment (casinos and electronics stores) mixed Russian and Ukrainian with some English. English and European languages with Roman script were also frequently used to `smooth over' the conflict between Ukrainian and Russian.The genetic closeness of Ukrainian and Russian allows a linguistic phenomenon that reconciles the languages, `bivalency'. Bivalency refers to shared linguistic elements between the languages, allowing the signs to appeal to the local population, while complying with the official Ukrainian language policy. This work analyzes and documents bivalency at phonological, morphological, and lexical levels, introducing a new sensitive tool for quantifying language dominance in signs.The overall conclusion is that signs in the LLs reveal that despite the official language policy, both Ukrainian and Russian appear in signs. In this way, Linguistic Landscapes may predict a future Ukraine in which both Russian and Ukrainian are accepted as official languages.This work contributes several new perspectives to the analyses of LLs. It demonstrates that LLs are multimodal, multilayered and multidimensional to be studied from a multidisciplinary perspective; the methodology integrates Critical Discourse Analysis and grounded theory; LLs are considered as texts analyzed on multiple discourse levels. The work invents and applies continua of bivalency as a multilevel phenomenon. The research focuses on LLs in eastern Ukraine.