Modernity is usually thought as a complex society with clearly differentiated spheres of everyday life. It means, in particular, that economic rules do not interfere with the norms structuring political, social, scientific and other interactions. The complex, differentiated society sharply...

Frank Elbe, Botschafter a.D., kommentiert die Entwicklung der Beziehungen zwischen der EU, den USA und Russland und spricht sich für ein besonnenes Vorgehen der Europäer gegenüber Russland aus. Die Bereitschaft zur Kooperation sollte nicht verlorengehen.

The strength of a society based on the rule of law can be measured by its ability to cope with extraordinary situations. It is under these conditions that constitutional guarantees of individual rights are in the greatest tension with the state’s need for self-preservation. There are times in...

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused disruptions in international trade and highlighted the dependency of small open economies in Europe on imports, especially of energy. These events may have changed Europeans’ attitude towards globalization. We study two waves of representative...

Political mobilization of business forces in the post-communist world has crucial implications for economic development and civil society. The emergence of strong cross-sectoral business associations during Putin's presidency challenges the prevailing view of Russia's political economy as an...

In this contribution to a symposium sponsored by the Michigan State University Journal of International Law, the author argues that predominantly evolutionary Soviet transition to the Rule of Law (initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev's ‘Perestroika' at the end of the 1980s) was derailed by...

The Public Chamber of the Russian Federation was created in response to a proposal by Vladimir Putin, and it began functioning in January 2006. The creation of that institution reflected a conception of civil society as supporting the state rather than confronting it. Yet the Public Chamber was...

This paper introduces the third update/release of the Global Sanctions Data Base (GSDB-R3). The GSDB-R3 extends the period of coverage from 1950-2019 to 1950-2022, which includes two special periods – COVID-19 and the war between Russia and Ukraine. The new update of the GSDB contains a total...

This paper studies the origins and consequences of the Russian mafia (vory-v-zakone). I web scraped a unique dataset that contains detailed biographies of more than 5,000 mafia leaders operating in 15 countries of the (former) Soviet Union at some point between 1916 and 2017. Using this data, I...

This paper argues that corruption in Russia is systemic in nature. Low wage levels of public officials provide strong incentives to engage in corruption. As corruption is illegal, corrupt officials can be exposed any time, which enforces loyalty towards the powers that be; thus corruption is a...