Publications

Purpose – The growing trend towards closing the political space for civil society in authoritarian regimes has primarily targeted NGOs focused on rights-based advocacy. Drawing on a study of disability NGOs in Russia, this paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the advocacy options that nonprofit organizations have even in repressive political contexts. The authors first review the extant literature to identify common actors, types and tactics and then trace what types of advocacy Russian NGOs are engaged in and what tactics they are able to utilize. Design/methodology/approach – The empirical part of this paper is based on 20 interviews conducted among active participants in disability NGOs in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Perm and Nizhniy Novgorod. Despite not being a representative sample of organizations, the selection of cities and organizations was intended to reflect spatial and structural factors of the field. Findings – The authors find that NGOs are able to pursue a broad range of advocacy activities despite a generally restrictive legal environment for civil society. Research limitations/implications – Research on advocacy in authoritarian countries is often focused on NGOs that are primarily engaged in these activities. This has overshadowed the considerable leeway that nonprofit service providers have to engage in advocacy. Practical implications – Service-providing NGOs should not forsake advocacy activities, even in authoritarian contexts, but can find access points in the political system and should seek to utilize their voice on behalf of their clients. Social implications – Despite general restrictions, NGOs can still find ways to successfully secure social rights, justice and solidarity, provided they accept the supremacy of the state in social policy and appeal to the state’s responsibility for the welfare of its citizens without directly questioning the overall status quo too heavily. Originality/value – We develop a broad framework for various advocacy forms and activities and apply it to nonprofit service providers.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts, AIST 2019, held in Kazan, Russia, in July 2019.

The 24 full papers and 10 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 134 submissions (of which 21 papers were rejected without being reviewed). The papers are organized in topical sections on general topics of data analysis; natural language processing; social network analysis; analysis of images and video; optimization problems on graphs and network structures; analysis of dynamic behaviour through event data.

This volume contains the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Analysis of Images, Social Networks, and Texts (AIST 2019). The previous conferences during 2012–2018 attracted a significant number of data scientists – students, researchers, academics, and engineers working on interdisciplinary data analysis of images, texts, and social networks.

This article examines how Russian NPOs in the field of domestic violence operate in a legal climate characterised by both state restriction and support. I conceptualise anti-violence NPOs that belonged to a network as an “epistemic community”. I demonstrate that these NPOs faced challenges to the recognition of their expertise by state representatives and to the promotion of their vision of policy change. Yet, the NPOs continued to invest their resources into educational events for state specialists. I propose to theorise these educational events as a means of developing a knowledge-based network that can support survivors despite lacking formal mechanisms for inter-agency collaboration.

The Rohingya are one of the most persecuted religious ethnic minorities of the contemporary world. They have been persecuted in Myanmar since the post-coup military regime came to power in 1962. What explains this brutal pursuit of violence against a minority? In answering this question, I trace the genealogy and the ethnogenesis of the Rohingya in Myanmar in a longue durée through an analysis of extant data, both historical and contemporary, and I supplement it with an ethnographic study I conducted in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. I argue that the emergence of the Rohingya identity is constitutively related with the stateformation, war conquest, and power shifts in Myanmar during precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial times. I demonstrate how the post-coup state of Myanmar – in association with the religious civil society, led by a section of the majoritarian Theravada Buddhist Bamars – provoked religious and exclusivist nationalism and constructed the ‘Rohingya Muslims’ as the enemy ‘Other’. I demonstrate also how the democratization of Myanmar ironically exacerbated the problem. The Rohingya themselves – once alienated and un-imagined from the national space – embraced this identity of victimhood to design their resilient and oppositional disposition against an exclusivist state, which further politicized and reified the identity.

Some features of epistolary genre as a form of communication, its evolution and its role in history are analyzed in this article. A comparison with the other forms of communication is carried out. The author considers the significance of the personal correspondence for the study of the history of sociological thought. He illustrates these general statements by a comparative analysis of the correspondences of Marx, on the one hand, and of Durkheim, on the other hand, as well as of their respective role in the work of these classics.

Currently many research information systems can provide, for a selected author, two groups of citation relationships: a) the outgoing citations linking the authors papers with papers cited by him/her; and b) the ingoing citations created by others and citing the authors papers. Using these citation relationships, one can build three groups of papers: (1) the papers of a selected author; (2) those papers cited by the author; (3) papers citing the author. Authors of papers from these three groups can be presented as a fragment of a research cooperation network, because they use/cite research outputs of each other. Their papers full texts, and especially the contexts of their in-text citations, contain some information about the character of this research cooperation. We present a concept of research cooperation, based on publications and the current results of the Cirtec project, for building the research cooperation characteristics. This work is based on the processing of citation content/context data. The results include an online service for authors to monitor the citation content data extractions and three types of built indicators/parameters: co-citation statistics, spatial distribution of citations over papers body and topic models for citation contexts.

In this paper we provide the methodology for evaluating ef- fectiveness of international sanctions using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), which we use for generating the network matrix for further anal- ysis. DEA is a non-parametric technique used to compare performance of similar units, such as departments or organizations. DEA has wide applications in all industries, and has been successfully used to compare performance of hospitals, banks, universities, etc. The most important advantage of this technique is that it can handle multiple input and out- put variables, even those not generally comparable to each other. We use the ”Threat and Imposition of Sanctions (TIES)” Data 4.0 for analysis. This database contains the largest number of cases of international sanctions (1412 from the years 1945-2005) imposed by some countries on others, takes into account simultaneous sanction imposition, and also estimates the cost of all sanctions - both for those who receive and those who impose them. As input variables for DEA model we use the impact of sender commitment, anticipated target and sender economic costs, and actual target and sender economic costs. As the output variable, we use the outcome of sanctions for senders. We describe how to use DEA cross-efficiency outputs to build the network of sanction episodes. Our proposed combination of DEA and network methodology allows us to cluster sanction episodes depending on their outcomes, and provides explanations of higher efficiency of one group of sanction episodes over the others.

In this paper we describe the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) research design and its applications for effectiveness evaluation of company marketing strategies. We argue that DEA is an efficient instrument for use in academia and industry to compare a company’s business performance with its competitors’. This comparison provides the company with information on the closest competitors, including evaluating strategies with similar costs, but more efficient outcomes (sales). Furthermore, DEA provides suggestions on the optimal marketing mix to achieve superior performance.

An innovative development based on the use of modern media and communication technologies requires a certain level of competence in how to use such technologies. These competencies are united by the concept of “information literacy”, proposed by Paul Gilster in 1997. The tradition of studying digital literacy in Russia is the subject of the following chapter. The different approaches to understanding digital literacy are as follows: ICT, psychological and pedagogical, media and information and industrial approaches.

Special attention is paid to the four-component digital literacy model, proposed in the framework of the project by ROCIT and the Higher School of Economics. This model is based on two substantial oppositions: firstly, the opposition “technical-technological/socio-humanitarian” and, secondly, the opposition “opportunities/threats”. It was used to construct the Index of Digital Literacy in the Russian Regions, measured since 2015.

The results of a series of media literacy measuring surveys by the ZIRCON Group from 2009–2016 are also presented.

Russia has undergone a historic transformation since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and employment relations are central to understanding the outcomes of this change. On the eve of reform, the trade unions inherited from the Soviet past were the sole organizations of civil society even theoretically able to impose social constraint on Russia’s new ruling elite. The Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR) – the successor organization to the soviet trade unions – entered the transition with a union density of nearly 99 per cent, but also with a history of subordination to management and the political authorities. As will be seen, the unions proved unable to escape their dependence, and therefore failed to provide effective representation of workers’ interests during economic reform. This gave the economic reformers a free hand, with disastrous consequences.

Conference proceedings of the V. annual German conference at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, April 17, 2019.

In this paragraph, the authors focus on analysing all the factors related to the accumulation of human potential and the integration of new knowledge in rural communities on Altai Krai’s Kulunda steppe that are largely responsible for the sustainable socio-economic development of this area. The analysis leads them to conclude that the understanding of the term ‘sustainable development’ in the directives of the krai and municipal administrations should be expanded in order to allow for the implementation of a number of measures. Those aimed at the socio-economic development of the region to ensure a specific quality of life for all generations in rural communities, both contemporary and future, that would involve the full realization of their human potential.

Abstract

The article is devoted to some aspects of the emotional culture of the late modern society, which will evidently undergo changes due to the new virus pandemic. The author draws on the opportunities that belong to the sociology of emotions, because emotions by their nature and function are related to overcoming of uncertainty of the future. The purpose of this essay is to review the main imperatives and contradictions of the emotional culture, identify some feelings that are a socially “sensitive” answer to the current circumstances. The future changes will probably become clearer, if we observe how the contradictions of the modern emotional culture will be resolved; for example, what development the simultaneous “emotionalization” and rationalization of social life will undergo. In the situation of crisis connected to the pandemic all the feelings will be involved, emotional norms and strategies of emotion management will be modified. The author believes that the moral individualism of modern societies will draw attention to the matters concerning social solidarity and moral guidelines, which could be viewed through the concepts of care, human sufferings and feelings that lie at their heart: anxiety and fear for other people, empathy, sympathy and compassion

Russian elections have been severely compromised by allegations of fraud, which makes public opinion polls an important source of information about popular support for Vladimir Putin and his policies. Putin's high ratings as well as the wide use of polls by his administration suggest that his rule is essentially democratic. This paper challenges this view by discussing the specific conception of democratic representation behind polling practices. Far from being a perfect mode of representation, opinion polls are capable of manufacturing the political reality they represent. The paper demonstrates how Russian authorities use polls to replace referenda and to legitimize the results of elections and thereby exposes the representational machine that turns polls into an efficient tool for governance, maintaining the hegemony and promoting de-politicisation. The distinction between partial and total representation, drawn from Ernesto Laclau's work, serves to illuminate the cases when polls and official election returns actually diverge and shows how the legitimacy of a regime is secured by the politics of representation that leaves a significant part of the Russian population unrepresented.

The renewed interest for Sufism, in the form of the celebration of a Sufi past, and the presence of Naqshbandi Sufi brotherhoods in the Volga and Urals ask the question of the place of Sufism in the region’s broader Islamic revival. In particular, how is Sufism related to the concept of “traditional Islam” as a central official category that seeks to define a local Islam? In order to understand how the place of Sufism is negotiated in relation to the notion of a local Islam, we analyse both how Sufism is integrated into the concept of traditional Islam on a more official level and how Sufi murids view their place in the Islamic revival. We refer to the literature on Sufism and its critiques and to new interpretations of the Volga-Ural Muslim history to highlight how negative images of the phenomenon and previous theological disputes form the background against which the Sufi revival takes place. Drawing on the idea of Sufism’s “disappearance” from a historical narrative in Soviet times and on the importance of anti-Sufi critiques in fashioning this narrative, we aim to understand how a new narrative on Sufism emerges on an official level and how it connects or not with the way Sufi murids perceive their beliefs and practices. By analysing convergences and divergences in official perceptions of Sufism and the perceptions of Sufi murids, we examine how the question of Sufism sheds light on the paradoxes in the concept of traditional Islam. Hence, Sufism challenges the image of a unified theological heritage as a foundation for traditional Islam, as it brings to the fore the anti-Sufi critique of previous Jadids. While official views and the views of Sufi murids converge on a more theological definition of traditional Islam understood as the three dimensions of Islam (islam, iman and ihsan), Sufism also raises the question of religious authority. Indeed, the spiritual hierarchies represented by Sufi tariqas may not be easy to reconcile with an official Muslim representation. Finally, Sufi murids refer to the notion of a local sacred geography, but also emphasise the transnational and transregional connections established by Sufi tariqas, thus pointing to another understanding of locality.

This chapter analyses the various ways Russian print media present the deinstitutionalisation of child welfare. The authors argue that media coverage of childcare policies legitimates the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ agents and practices. By doing so, the media construct a social problem and demarcate symbolic boundaries along several sociopolitical divides, thereby attempting to achieve control through the promotion of an ‘us vs. them’ discourse in Russian public discussions. The authors find that the search for ‘who is to blame’ begins with foreign adoptive parents, and then shifts towards domestic actors in the field of patronat and juvenile justice. It was revealed that many children are on the margins; as the metaphor of ‘last-minute’ children, raised in one article, shows, they are only adopted unexpectedly and, in many cases, not at all. Some themes are missing or very rarely mentioned in the newspapers examined in this study, including professionalisation of care that relates to children’s rights. Children are generally treated as an object than a subject of social relations, victims of circumstances, the living outcome of deficiencies of state institutional upbringing, or a result of poor decisions made by birth parents

The title of the book refers to the sociological survey, conducted by the "Public opinion" Fund in 2000. It is focused on the representation of Internet as a complex phenomenon in modern Russia. First, the Internet is considered as part of the media system that not only rapidly developing, but also significantly transforming the system as a whole. Second, it contains the analysis of main online markets in Russia. Thirdly, the Internet is analyzed in political, social and cultural contexts.