My dissertation examines the Russian state's response to sexual and domestic violence and the women's movements that have arisen to challenge both the state's inaction and the violence itself. My project is grounded in a 1999, eight-month research trip to Moscow and the provincial cities of Saratov and Orel, Russia, where I gathered data through participant observation. Transition theory argues that the liberalization of institutions and practices holds great promise for all people, including women, who may not be immediately incorporated as equal citizens but will have the political opportunity to fight for their inclusion. In contrast, feminist democratic theory finds that democratic liberalism, notably through its distinction between public and private spheres, institutionalizes its own obstacles to women's inclusion. Bridging these two theories, I use the issues of violence specific to women--woman battery, familiar rape, and sexual harassment--to examine the obstacles and opportunities for women created in postcommunism. I find that while the transition has created some political opportunity for women's movements, its greater impact has been the privatization of these forms of violence against women as outside the responsibility of the criminal-legal system. While there are policies that promise to protect (male-)citizens from violence in general, there are only limited promises for the violence that is specific to women. As the right to live free from bodily harm is both fundamental and necessary for political participation, the transition threatens to institutionalize the exclusion of women. As part of the growing body of literature on the Russian transition, my project injects a necessary concern for the role of activism, especially women's activism, in democratization and challenges transition theory to move beyond baseline procedures of democracy to take account of the inclusion and exclusion of citizens. Russia's transition from institutions antithetical to liberal democracy to those more democratic is a "natural experiment" that can highlight how democratic institutions facilitate and obstruct the citizenship of women.

Domestic violence has emerged as a significant public policy issue of transnational character and mobilization in the postcommunist era in Europe and Eurasia, as global forces have interacted with the agendas of governments, local and international women's groups, and human rights activists. The result of extensive collaboration among scholars and activist-practitioners -- many from postcommunist countries -- this volume examines the development of state policies, changes in public perceptions, and the interaction of national and international politics.

This book looks at Russian women’s mobilization and agency during the two periods of transformation, the turn of the 19th-20th century and the 20th – 21st century. Bringing together the parallels between the two great transformations, it focuses on both the continuities and breaks and, importantly, it shows them from the grassroots point of view, emphasizing the local factor. Chapters show the international and transnational aspects of Russian women’s agency of different spheres and different historical periods. The book goes on to raise new research questions such as the evaluation and comparison of Soviet society and contemporary Russia from the point of view of gender and women’s possibilities in society.

A vibrant civil society - characterized by the independently organized activity of people as citizens, undirected by state authority - is an essential support for the development of freedom, democracy, and prosperity. Thus it has been one important indicator of the success of post-communist transitions. This volume undertakes a systematic analysis of the development of civil society in post-Soviet Russia. An introduction and two historical chapters provide background, followed by chapters that analyze the Russian context and consider the roles of the media, business, organized crime, the church, the village, and the Putin administration in shaping the terrain of public life. Eight case studies then illustrate the range and depth of actual citizen organizations in various national and local community settings, and a concluding chapter weighs the findings and distills comparisons and conclusions.

Law, crime, and justice are among the most salient issues in any country. This is especially true for a transitional nation like Russia that is facing tremendous social, political, and economic changes, many of which create conditions conducive to crime. These ongoing changes have had profound effects on every major social institution in the country, and the transition from totalitarianism and a command economy toward rule of law and a free market is resulting in shifts in fundamental cultural values. In this environment, governmental agencies are often left without a clear mission, especially given their sometimes dubious roles during the Soviet era, and are rarely provided with the resources necessary to fulfill the difficult duties that are so vital to a functional democracy. This volume, with chapters by highly respected scholars in several disciplines, provides a comprehensive sourcebook of scholarly analysis of the effects of these changes on legal developments and rule of law in Russia, its changing patterns and nature of crime, and its criminal justice system. Contributions by: Adrian Beck, William E. Butler, Linda J. Cook, Galina N. Evdokushkina, Leonid A. Gavrilov, Natalia S. Gavrilova, Alla E. Ivanova, Janet Elise Johnson, Roy King, Robert W. Orttung, Letizia Paoli, Laura Piacentini, William Alex Pridemore, Annette Robertson, Daniel G. Rodeheaver, Richard Sakwa, Olga Schwartz, Victoria G. Semyonova, Louise I. Shelley, Peter H. Solomon Jr., Janine R. Wedel, and James L. Williams

How has the collapse of communism across Europe and Eurasia changed gender? In addition to acknowledging the huge costs that fell heavily on women, Living Gender after Communism suggests that moving away from communism in Europe and Eurasia has provided an opportunity for gender to multiply, from varieties of neo-traditionalism to feminisms, from overt negotiation of femininity to denials of gender. This development, in turn, has enabled some women in the region to construct their own gendered identities for their own political, economic, or social purposes. Beginning with an understanding of gender as both a society-wide institution that regulates people's lives and a cultural "toolkit" which individuals and groups may use to subvert or "transvalue" the sex/gender system, the contributors to this volume provide detailed case studies from Belarus, Bosnia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. This collaboration between young scholars -- most from postcommunist states -- and experts in the fields of gender studies and postcommunism combines intimate knowledge of the area with sophisticated gender analysis to examine just how much gender realities have shifted in the region. Contributors are Anna Brzozowska, Karen Dawisha, Nanette Funk, Ewa Grigar, Azra Hromadzic, Janet Elise Johnson, Anne-Marie Kramer, Tania Rands Lyon, Jean C. Robinson, Iulia Shevchenko, Svitlana Taraban, and Shannon Woodcock.

This volume provides a much needed update on the state of civil society in post-communist Europe and Russia more than two decades after the fall of the communist regimes. The chapters offer new perspectives on social movement strategies in post-communist Central-Eastern Europe and Russia. The chapters illustrate how social movements develop particular repertoires of action and contention, which are better suited for their specific local contexts in the post-communist setting. In Russia and Poland, the most popular and effective choices are using domestic and transnational legal opportunities, judicial activism and litigation that complement the traditional lobbying and mass mobilization. Human rights framing has become important in Hungary and the Czech Republic. The chapters analyse various types of rights-based activism that operate in otherwise prohibitive social and political environments, thereby raising highly contentious issues, such as animal rights, environment and sustainability, human rights, women’s rights, and gay rights activism. The contributions richly illustrate the often surprising and multiple ways in which transnational discourses and norm pressure are received, translated or resisted in the local contexts. Finally, the volume provides a novel reconceptualisation and offers new understandings of the relationships between the state and civil society in the post-communist context. This book is based on a special issue of East European Politics.

Just a few years ago, most Russian citizens did not recognize the notion of domestic violence or acknowledge that such a problem existed. Today, after years of local and international pressure to combat violence against women, things have changed dramatically. Gender Violence in Russia examines why and how this shift occurred—and why there has been no similar reform on other gender violence issues such as rape, sexual assault, or human trafficking. Drawing on more than a decade of research, Janet Elise Johnson analyzes media coverage and survey data to explain why some interventions succeed while others fail. She describes the local-global dynamics between a range of international actors, from feminist activists to national governments, and an equally diverse set of Russian organizations and institutions.

While the decline of communism in the late twentieth century brought democracy, political freedom, and better economic prospects for many people, it also produced massive social dislocation and engendered social problems that were far less pronounced under the old regimes. The fall of state socialism led to enormously complex political, economic, social, and cultural transformations, and while political liberalization was a lofty goal, it was neither uniform in its effects nor unqualified in its benefits. Postcommunism from Within foregrounds the diversity of the historical experiences and current realities of people in the postcommunist region in examining how they are responding to these monumental changes at home. The original essays in this volume lay out a bold new approach to research on the postcommunist region, and to democratization studies more broadly, that focuses on the social and cultural microprocesses behind political and economic transformation. Thematic essays by eminent scholars of postcommunism from across the social sciences are supported by case studies to demonstrate the limitations of current democratization paradigms and suggest ways of building categories of research that more closely capture the role of vernacular knowledge in demanding, creating, and adapting to institutional change. A novel approach to understanding one of the greatest political and social transformations in recent history, Postcommunism from Within explores not just how citizens respond to political and economic restructuring engineered at the top but also how people enact their own visions of life, politics, and justice by responding to daily challenges.