Research notes

On Sunday, 27 September 2020, a new war started in Nagorno Karabakh. It immediately appeared that this was a wide-scale military operation, as it involved the whole line of contact. It did not take long to understand that this was going to be worse than the deadly clashes in April 2016, and thus the largest escalation in more than two decades. Within the first ten days, there where tens of thousands civilians displaced by war, many hundreds of military casualties, thousands of injured, dozens of civilian casualties… this was, by any understanding of the term, a war.

In the first days of post-electoral protests in Belarus, state news were largely in denial: no mention of the protests or tiny segments suggesting not much was going on, with routine coverage of Lukashenko doing routine visits and such. After more than 10 days of protests, things have changed considerably. Panorama, an evening news programme supposed to last 50 minutes according to schedule, went on for two full hours. Most of it was dedicated to discussing in one way or the other the “complex political situation” in the country.

My PhD thesis - What is the effect of non-recognition? The external relations of de facto states in the post-Soviet space - is now online and can be downloaded freely. Aware of the limited allure of a 300-pages pdf file, I decided to outline here some key outcomes (not necessarily the conclusions), as well as some additional thoughts. 1. Non-recognition is the symptom, not the cause First, a one-paragraph summary of my conclusions.

Is being famous nationally an asset or a liability for candidates competing in a single-constituency electoral system in a small polity? Judging from the recent elections in Abkhazia, certainly not a big asset, and probably a liability, in particular in the second round. In this post, “being famous” is operationalised as “number of mentions of given candidate” in Abkhazia’s main news agency. Relevant data are presented in a few graphs below.

The data included in this post were prepared for publication on the online journal Ukraine-Analysen 182 (http://www.laender-analysen.de/ukraine/pdf/UkraineAnalysen182.pdf). This is a quick update to the data presented in a previous post published on this blog in November 2015 on “ Word frequency of ‘Ukraine’, ‘Crimea’, and ‘Syria’ on Russia’s First Channel". The dataset has been created by extracting textual contents of each news item published on Pervy Kanal’s website between the beginning of Putin’s presidency on 7 May 2012 and 1 March 2017 (115.

Recently, Scan Interfax revealed that in the month of January 2017, for the first time since 2011, Vladimir Putin has not been the most frequently mentioned individual on Russian media: Donald Trump was. The news quickly made the rounds on American media (e.g. on Washington Post, Newsweek, CNN, and others). According to an article by Konstantin von Eggert published by Deutsche Welle, on 15 February Russian state-owned media of the VGTRK group were instructed to stop talking about Trump so much.

This post outlines basic information about pensions in Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria, and the role of Russia in financing the pensions of residents in these territories. It is based on data and information available online, and includes references to relevant legislations and international treaties. All information comes either directly from official sources, or from news agencies quoting official sources.

Just more than a month has passed since Russia started its military intervention in Syria. There has been a lot of talking about the motivations behind the Kremlin’s decision to take an active military role in the Middle East, and a number of competing explanations have been proposed. However, one element that has been frequently quoted is the Kremlin’s desire to shift attention in Russia’s media from Ukraine to something else, while maintaining the focus on foreign affairs rather than domestic issues.

It requires a big effort to stay up-to-date with academic publications in one’s sphere of interest. I put together this post to make it easier to have at least a quick overview of what has been published recently in English-language peer-reviewed journals for those with an interest in post-Soviet, post-Communist and Eastern European affairs. First, there’s a list of the journals I think are most relevant for scholars focusing on this region, in no particular order (if you think I am missing something important, please let me know).

At the latest ASN conference in New York I have been talking with Sofie Bedford about the rhetoric of ‘double standards’ in Azerbaijan and elsewhere. The conversation prompted a vary basic research question: “is it true that Azerbaijan’s president has been using more and more the rhetoric of ‘double standards’?” Since it is exactly the kind of straightforward question that can be easily approached with a tool I have been working on recently that simplifies quantitative content analysis of textual materials available online, I gave it a spin… and here are the results.