Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society

This special issue deals with the phenomenon of violence in the post-Soviet space. The central preoccupation is to examine both political and legal discourses and practices of internal and external violence, broadly conceived, in this space. Simultaneously the special issue aspires to situate these discourses and practices in the broader literature on political violence and ethnic and separatist conflict, and to examine these from political, legal, and security studies perspectives.



The issue approaches the problem of violence in the post-Soviet space from three perspectives: The international-structural, inter-state, and domestic-political. The contributors focus on structural sources of violence: The relevance of the self-determination principle, the role of democratization, and the relationship between violent behavior inside and outside the state. They also analyze the role of the Russian Federation in generating, perpetuating, and mitigating political violence. Finally, they adopt a bottom-up approach, exploring how non-state actors contribute to political violence.



Guest editors:



Marcin Kaczmarski is Assistant Professor at the Institute of International Relations, University of Warsaw, and the Head of the China-EU Programme at the Centre for Eastern Studies, Warsaw. His main research interests include Russia-China relations, Russia’s foreign policy and broader issues of rising powers’ place in international politics. He has published in Problems of Post-Communism and Demokratizatsiya. His monograph, Russia-China Relations in the Post-crisis International order was recently published by Routledge.







Natasha Kuhrt is a lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. She is co-convenor of the British International Studies Association Working Group on Russian and Eurasian Security and an affiliate of the King’s Russia institute. Her main research interests are in the field of Russia’s Asia policy, as well as broader issues of international law, sovereignty, and intervention. She is the author of Russian Policy towards China and Japan: the El’tsin and Putin Periods (Routledge 2008); and co-editor (with Aidan Hehir and Andrew Mumford) of International Law, Security and Ethics: Policy Challenges in the Post-9/11 World (Routledge 2011); editor of Russia and the World: the Internal-External Nexus (Routledge 2013; previously a special issue of Europe-Asia Studies); and the author of articles in Europe-Asia Studies and Politics, and numerous book chapters.