How is the Internet produced as an infrastructure in post-socialist Lithuania? Migle Bareikyte contributes to the growing field of STS and media studies with a distinct focus on Eastern Europe. She situates the Internet development in Lithuania's telecom industry with the exploration of its labor practices, geopolitical imaginaries, and critical negotiations from a bottom-up perspective. Bareikyte further explores how fieldwork-based research can foster new theorizations of media infrastructures. Finally, she argues for a situated investigation of new places and actors beyond the United States and Western Europe-such as post-socialist regions-in order to explore the diversity of media infrastructures.

This book uses a range of S&T and structural indicators to analyse the transfonnation process, in particular the transfonnation of science, technology and industry, in the fonner communist countries. The book originates from a sense of the tremendous need for quantitative indicators for assessing trends and perfonnance in the post-socialist economies. S&T systems in the region have passed through the first phase of rapid deterioration, or as it is called by some analysts 'implosion'. After ten years of transfonnation we are witnessing a process of increasing differentiation of these countries in tenns of general patterns of growth and structural change, as well as specific lines of restructuring in their S&T systems. The question of sources of growth - or indeed of stagnation - is an increasingly urgent one, from both the policy and academic perspectives. In that context there is a pressing need for in-depth assessment of restructuring patterns in science, technology and industry in the region, as a basis for understanding how restructuring in S&T is linked to industrial restructuring, and to general economic and social transfonnation. As the contributions to this volume show, there is now a critical mass of quantitative data across the post-socialist countries which deserves to be studied more thoroughly in a comparative manner. The changes of the last ten years have produced varying patterns of adjustment which are now clearly visible in S&T and structural indicators.

This book re-examines the origins of modern Mongolian nationalism, discussing nation building as sponsored by the socialist Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party and the Soviet Union and emphasizing in particular the role of the arts and the humanities. It considers the politics and society of the early revolutionary period and assesses the ways in which ideas about nationhood were constructed in a response to Soviet socialism. It goes on to analyze the consequences of socialist cultural and social transformations on pastoral, Kazakh, and other identities and outlines the implications of socialist nation building on post-socialist Mongolian national identity. Overall, Socialist and Post-Socialist Mongolia highlights how Mongolia’s population of widely scattered seminomadic pastoralists posed challenges for socialist administrators attempting to create a homogenous mass nation of individual citizens who share a set of cultural beliefs, historical memories, collective symbols, and civic ideas; additionally, the book addresses the changes brought more recently by democratic governance.

This book traces the cultural transformation of nostalgia on the Chinese screen over the past three decades. It explores how filmmakers from different generations have engaged politically with China’s rapidly changing post-socialist society as it has been formed through three mutually constitutive frameworks: political discourse, popular culture and state-led media commercialisation. The book offers a new, critical model for understanding relationships between filmmakers, industry and the State.

This is an age of neo-liberalism, in which the advantages and virtues of private property are often taken for granted. Post-socialist governments have privatized and broken up state farms and socialist cooperatives. However, economic outcomes and the social insecurity now experienced by many rural inhabitants highlight the need for a broader anthropological analysis of property relations, which go beyond changes of legal form. A century after Kautsky addressed "The Agrarian Question" in Germany, it is necessary to address a post-socialist Agrarian Question throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and China. The studies collected here derive from the first cycle of projects carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. They are prefaced by a substantial introduction by Chris Hann. Chris Hann is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/ Saale.

Fairness of wage distribution – or the perception of such – is a phenomenon crucial for the stability of new democracies. While theories exist about how change of the political system trickles down to the attitudinal level, the systematic analysis of the effect of economic transition on public attitudes has been neglected to a large extent. Wage Distribution Fairness in Post-Socialist Countries proposes a conceptual framework to measure the fairness of wage distribution. Indeed, looking particularly at wage distribution fairness in three post-socialist societies (Hungary, East Germany, Czech Republic) since the transition in 1989, this challenging monograph also aims to understand if, and to what extent, the experience of a socialist regime motivates individuals to consider wage distribution as fair. Contributing to our understanding of the relevance of socialization and other situational factors influencing economic legitimacy, Wage Distribution Fairness in Post-Socialist Countries will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers, interested in fields including: Sociology, Eastern European Studies and Political Economics.

Moving past the conflation of state socialism with all socialist projects, this book opens up avenues for addressing socialist projects rooted in decolonial and antiracist politics. To that end, this anthology brings together scholarship across regions that engages postsocialism as an analytic that connects the ‘afters’ of the capitalist– socialist dynamic to present day politics. Resisting the revolutionary teleology of what was before, “postsocialism” can function to create space to work through ongoing legacies of socialisms in the present. Looking at the Middle East, Scandanavia, Korea, Romania, China, and the US, the chapters in this book assess ongoing socialist legacies in new ethical collectivities and networks of dissent opposing state- and corporate- based military, economic, and cultural expansionism since the end of the Cold War. The majority of the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Social Identities.

Presents an up-to-date look at the social processes and consequences of China's rapid economic growth.

This book presents cross-national insights into spatial fragmentation in post-socialist cities in Europe. Trying to rethink the heritage of the last 30 years of transformation and grasp current processes taking urban units of various categories as examples, the book exemplifies typical or unique causes of political, social and ethnic disintegration of cities in Central and Eastern Europe. Presenting spatial studies into different cases of conflict in a cross-national context, the authors apply concepts of contested and divided cities, urban geopolitics, cultural atavism, contested heritage, etc. The book is divided into four parts. The first part raises the issue of genesis, development and contemporary discrepancies of cities divided by political and state borders. The second part includes chapters which deal with the impact of ongoing geopolitical divisions, wars, and ideologies on the social and political tensions as well as their polarising effect on urban territory. The third part comprises reflections on controversial relations of ethnic and national culture with urban space. The fourth part deals with socio-economic transformation of post-socialist cities which went through transition of old patterns of spatial planning and attempts to establish more rational and justice spatial order.

This book explores the politics of gender and democracy in post-communist Europe. Utilising the concept of political representation, the book scrutinises women’s legislative presence and highlights the opportunities and obstacles to parity democracy in this region of Europe. The book examines the link between women’s membership of national parliaments and the substantive representation of gender interests. It investigates the role of civil society, the state and the European Union in representing women’s interests and in promoting gender politics. The book provides an important and timely contribution to the classical political questions of who represents, what is represented, and how representation takes place. In adopting an integrated approach to political representation, the book extends current understanding of this fundamental concept. Using new research, it provides the first comprehensive comparative analysis of the interplay between emerging democracies and gender politics in post-communist Europe.