Ion Marandici

Why did Russia’s authoritarian leader decide to annex Crimea? Why couldn’t Ukraine resist the Russian aggression? This study relies on prospect theory to illuminate the decision-making in Moscow and Kyiv that led to the takeover of Crimea. First, I identify the turning points of the Euromaidan crisis preceding the annexation and trace how Putin’s assessment of the status quo shifted repeatedly between the domains of losses and gains. In the domain of losses, the Russian leader, influenced by a neoimperial faction within the presidential administration, became more risk acceptant, annexed the peninsula, and escalated the hybrid warfare. In doing so, the paper shows that Putin framed the intervention using nationalist themes, drawing on salient historical analogies from the past. Second, new documentary evidence such as the minutes of Ukraine’s National Defense and Security Council (NDSC) and participant testimonies reveals that the decision makers in Kyiv could not mount an effective defense due to squabbles among coalition partners, the breakdown of the military chain of command in Crimea, the looming threat of a full-scale invasion from the East, and the inflated expectations regarding the West’s capacity to deter Russia’s aggression. Third, the article relies on prospect theory to explain why after Crimea’s annexation, Putin refrained from continuing the territorial expansion deeper into Ukraine, opting instead to back secessionism in Donbas. This account highlights the explanatory power of prospect theory compared to alternative frameworks, pointing out, at the same time, the need to incorporate causal mechanisms from competing theoretical traditions in studies of foreign policy decision-making.

How does social media facilitate deliberation and collective remembering of past revolutions amid protests in democratizing contexts? To explore this question, I performed a qualitative and quantitative analysis of a unique archive of tweets posted during Moldova’s Twitter Revolution in 2009. The research revealed that Twitter enabled users living in Moldova and Romania to connect online, share information, and chat about the meanings of revolution, civil society activism, and resistance to state oppression, all while providing updates to Western media and warning the public about human rights abuses. Also, the research uncovered that the #pman audiences from Moldova and Romania framed the protest differently. Whereas the Moldovans regarded it as a demonstration against election fraud, the Romanian twitterers framed the events as an anti-communist uprising analogous to the 1989 Revolution, which they mythologized to extract useful strategies for action communicated to the Moldovan a...

Despite Western mediation efforts, the protracted conflicts in Transnistria (Moldova) and Donbas (Ukraine) remain unresolved with elusive prospects for durable peace. Russia as a biased third-party contributes to the current stalemate, as it favors one of the disputants, and displays strong preferences for a specific settlement scenario. Given the magnitude of these crises, it is worth critically examining why past mediation approaches in Moldova and Ukraine have failed: Under what conditions does conflict resolution fail? Are biased mediators more effective than impartial, third-party intervenors?

Existing research lacks scholarly consensus. Mediation success has been traced to a hodgepodge of sources including dispute characteristics, inter-relationships among parties involved, mediator bias, international context, and mediation style.1 A major scholarly debate concerns the role of biased mediation in conflict management.2 This article comparatively examines the disputes in Moldova and Ukraine to argue that conflict resolution fails when a former imperial power acts as a biased mediator that interferes in the domestic politics of the parent-states, while openly supporting the secessionist regions economically, militarily, and politically.

ABSTRACT What explains the economic endurance of the post-Soviet unrecognized states? Drawing insights from the scholarship on economic institutions, rentier states, and patron–client relations, this article explores the resource-extraction strategies of the post-Soviet de facto states via a paired comparison of Transnistria (PMR) and the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). The authors conceptualize the post-Soviet de facto states as rentier clients and discuss the defining characteristics of PMR’s oligarchic model and DPR’s provisional dirigiste system. The two secessionist regions manage production, trade, tax, construct budgets, and shape property rights regimes, while receiving vital aid from the patron-state.

This article explores nation-building processes in the Transnistrian imagined community. While some scholars describe Transnistria’s nation-building strategy as a civic, multicultural project, the analysis of recent demographic and educational data corroborated with the close examination of local media content and official discourses—all point to the emergence of a distinct political culture marked by the increasing use of the Russian language in the public sphere, and the politicization of the Moldovan identity. Discourses about ethnic and national identity in the region have evolved as the Transnistrian elites reimagine the political community as part of theRusskii Mir.These circumstances suggest that, in the long run, the breakaway region might function as the southeastern frontline of Russian irredentism with the elites of the Pridnestrovska͡ia Moldavska͡ia Respublika continuing to call on the Russian Federation to annex the parastate instead of seeking a peaceful reintegration ...

How can we explain the economic endurance of the post-Soviet unrecognized states? Drawing insights from the literature on economic institutions, rentier states, and patron-client relations, this article explores the resource extraction strategies of de facto states via a paired comparison of Transnistria (PMR) and the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR). The authors conceptualize the post-Soviet de facto states as rentier clients. In doing so, we identify and discuss the defining characteristics of two secessionist political economies-PMR's oligarchic model and DPR's provisional dirigiste system. Our study clarifies the mechanisms of economic endurance by showing how de facto states manage production, trade, tax and shape property rights regimes, while receiving the external rent from the Russian patron-state. The study also details the ways in which the patron-state became deeply embedded in the political economy of the two disputed regions.

This paper examines the role of the European Union and its European Neighborhood Policy as well as the ambivalent role played by Ukraine in Transnistria. It shows, among other things, that Ukraine became more active in proposing solutions for the conflict in Transnistria after the Orange Revolution (2004). (Available only in German)

China’s politicians like to emphasise that they are building a socialist market economy based on the ideology of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Unlike other post-communist transitions to capitalism, China’s radical economic transformations during the neo-liberal era did not generate a large pool of economic losers. On the contrary, over the last three decades, seven hundred million Chinese escaped poverty. Yet at the same time, China’s impressive economic growth has been associated with the rise of a wealthy elite, which gradually is being co-opted by the party-state. Relying on elite-level and survey data, this study goes beyond socio-demographic characteristics and investigates whether party membership, education, beliefs in upward mobility and support for an interventionist state correlate with income levels. The final section discusses the implications of the observed trends for the future of the Chinese economic model.

This article explores the main dimensions of the Transnistrian imagined community. While some scholars view Transnistria’s nation-building strategy as a civic multicultural project, the analysis of recent demographic and educational data corroborated with the close examination of local media content and official discourses, all point to the emergence of a distinct political culture and the growing Russification of the public sphere. This article documents the parastate’s politicization of the Moldovan identity and the attempts of the Transnistrian elites to reimagine the political community as part of the Russkii Mir. These circumstances suggest that, in the long run, the breakaway region might function as the southeastern frontline of Russian irredentism with the Transnistrian elites continuing to call on the Russian Federation to annex the region instead of seeking a peaceful reintegration into Moldova.

The paper provides an explanation for the emergence, consolidation and decline of the Moldovan Communists' Party. Drawing on the literature on successor parties and examining the Moldovan case, the author identifies the main factors that influenced the success of the Moldovan successor party. Tracing the adaptation strategy of the Moldovan successor party, he finds confirming evidence for five of the factors already mentioned in the theoretical literature on successor parties: the economic situation, the weakness of the opponents, the electoral laws, the fragmentation of the political spectrum, and the legacy of the old regime. However, the author identified seven additional explanatory drivers of PCRM's rise and consolidation: the nation-building strategy centered on the Soviet notion of the Moldovan identity, the state-building process, the control over the media, some foreign support, separatism, the appeal to the ethnic minorities, and the alliance-building capacity. It is due to this complex multicausal pattern that the successor party in Moldova managed to consolidate and expand its constituency. Its decline can be explained by the authoritarian style of its leader unwilling to step down.  This paper aims at expanding the universe of cases on which the previous theories were constructed.

Who are the post-Soviet oligarchs? Have they been members of the nomenklatura before 1991? Did they accumulate their initial wealth before or after privatization? To answer these questions, I have compiled an original dataset of oligarchs drawing on publicly available biographical data in the fifteen republics of the former Soviet Union. The dataset covers the period from 1991 to 2011. There are two trends in the literature on oligarchs. One group of scholars argues that the oligarchs represent the former nomenklatura, while the second group claims that the members of the new business elites have diverse career backgrounds. The findings in this paper disconfirm the nomenklatura capitalism hypothesis. First, I show that many of the oligarchs were initially founders of cooperatives, some of them too young to be part of the party bureaucracy. Second, I parse out the oligarchic career paths, and suggest that most oligarchs made their fortunes by trading various goods during the perestroika period. Trading involved significant risks and was deemed as a quasi-criminal activity, so leading party officials were less likely to jeopardize their party careers by engaging in trading. Third, many oligarchs move from trading to banking and from banking to industry. The future oligarchs were individuals, who took high risks and accumulated their initial capital prior to the privatization rounds in their respective countries. However, numerous oligarchs have used their initial capital to become industrialists. This project contributes to a better understanding of the origins and emergence of oligarchs in the fifteen republics of the former Soviet Union.