(Sean's Russia Blog) How does politics in Eurasia really work? Henry Hale warns against overly simplistic interpretations of post-Soviet politics, such as writing Russia off as a dictatorship where nothing matters but Putin’s will. Instead, one must understand the specific social context in which he and other successful Eurasian leaders operate and the complex political considerations they must balance.
Hale: "I started to see these cycles of periods of intense contestation for power alternating with periods where you had seemingly all the major forces rallying around a particular leader, in some kind of cyclic process. All this led me to think that maybe the framework that we usually use in terms of thinking about 'Are these democracies or are these authoritarian countries?’ really didn't fit very well to the patterns of regime dynamics that we see in the post-Soviet world. So I started to see about other conceptual tools for understanding what is going on." […]
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Henry Hale's most recent book is Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective published by Cambridge University Press.
