Download or read book Police Reform and State building in Georgia Kyrgyzstan and Russia written by Liam O'Shea and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Police Reform in the Former Soviet States of Georgia and Kyrgyzstan written by Natalie Barros and published by Nova Science Publishers. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In most Soviet successor states, the police (militia) are among the least trusted government agencies. The police are frequently seen as representatives of the state who are allowed to persecute ordinary citizens, extort bribes, and protect the real criminals. This leads to cycles of mutual antagonism in which society does not expect the police to perform their function properly, and the police are unable to enforce state regulation on society. In the examples of Georgia and Kyrgyzstan in this book, one of the authors examine which domestic processes will likely fail and which have a chance to succeed in changing the post-Soviet police from a punitive institution into a more democratic entity. The book then continues to provide the reader with information on recent developments and the interests of the United States in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.
Download or read book Reforming the Police in Post Soviet States written by Erica Marat and published by . This book was released on 2019-07-29 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report identifies and explains the determinants of police reform in former Soviet states by examining the cases of Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. The two cases were chosen to show two drastically different approaches to reform played out in countries facing arguably similar problems with state-crime links, dysfunctional governments, and corrupt police forces. In Georgia, the government's reform program has fundamentally transformed the police, but it also reinforced the president Mikhail Saakashvili regime's reliance on the police. With two political regime changes in one decade, Kyrgyzstan's failed reform effort led to increasing levels of corruption within law enforcement agencies and the rise of violent nonstate groups. The experiences of Georgia and Kyrgyzstan show that a militarized police force is unlikely to spontaneously reform itself, even if the broader political landscape becomes more democratic. If anything, the Interior Ministry will adapt to new political leadership, both to ensure its own position in society and to continue receiving the state resources needed to sustain itself. Both Georgia and Kyrgyzstan offer important guidelines for conducting successful police reform in a former Soviet state, advice that could be helpful to the Middle Eastern states currently undergoing rapid political transformation.
Download or read book Reforming the Police in Post Soviet States written by Strategic Studies Institute and published by . This book was released on 2014-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report identifies and explains the determinants of police reform in former Soviet states by examining the cases of Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. The two cases were chosen to show two drastically different approaches to reform played out in countries facing arguably similar problems with state-crime links, dysfunctional governments, and corrupt police forces. In Georgia, the government's reform program has fundamentally transformed the police, but it also reinforced the president Mikhail Saakashvili regime's reliance on the police. With two political regime changes in one decade, Kyrgyzstan's failed reform effort led to increasing levels of corruption within law enforcement agencies and the rise of violent nonstate groups. The experiences of Georgia and Kyrgyzstan show that a militarized police force is unlikely to spontaneously reform itself, even if the broader political landscape becomes more democratic.
Download or read book The Politics of Police Reform written by Erica Marat and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a Russian saying that "police mirror society." The gist of this is that every society is policed to the extent that it allows itself to be policed. Centralized in control but decentralized in their reach, the police are remarkably similar in structure, chain of command, and their relationships with the political elite across post-Soviet nations--they also remain one of the least reformed post-communist institutions. As a powerful state organ, the Soviet-style militarized police have resisted change despite democratic transformations in the overall political context, including rounds of competitive elections and growing civil society. While consensus between citizens and the state about reform may be possible in democratic nations, it is considerably more difficult to achieve in authoritarian states. Across post-Soviet countries, such discussions most often occur between political elites and powerful non-state actors, such as criminal syndicates and nationalistic ethnic groups, rather than the wider citizenry. Even in countries where one or more rounds of democratic elections have taken place since 1991, empowered citizens and politicians have not renegotiated the way states police and coerce society. On the contrary, in many post-Soviet countries, police functions have expanded to serve the interests of the ruling political elites. What does it take to reform a post-Soviet police force? This book explores the conditions in which a meaningful transformation of the police is likely to succeed and when it will fail. Departing from the conventional interpretation of the police as merely an institution of coercion, this book defines it as a medium for state-society consensus on the limits of the state's legitimate use of violence. It thus considers policing not as a way to measure the state's capacity to coerce society, but rather as a reflection of a complex society bound together by a web of casual interactions and political structures. The book compares reform efforts in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan, finding that bottom-up public mobilization is likely to emerge in the aftermath of transformative violence--an incident when the usual patterns of policing are interrupted with unprecedented brutality against vulnerable individuals. Ultimately, The Politics of Police Reform examines the various pathways to transforming how the state relates to society through policing.
Download or read book Reforming the Police in Post Soviet States written by United States United States Army War College and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-09-24 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it take for a state to reform its police forces? In the post-Soviet space, the police remain one of the least-reformed government institutions, infamous for graft, collaboration with organized criminal groups, and human rights violations. The police still serve as a political instrument, even in more politically open countries. For countries that have embarked on police reform and, at the very least, sought to change the institution's name from "militsya" to "politsiya," suggesting a more Westernized understanding of the role of law-enforcement agencies, the change was made only in name, not in content. This book examines the forces driving police reform programs in former Soviet states and what leads to their success. Specifically, it examines a decade of reform efforts in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan from the perspective of political leaders, opposition forces, the homegrown nongovernmental organization community, and international actors. The two cases were chosen to show two drastically different approaches to reform played out in countries facing arguably similar problems with state-crime links, dysfunctional governments, and corrupt police forces. Both Georgia and Kyrgyzstan have undergone dramatic political transformations since the early 2000s. Both saw regimes change and political power turnovers that led to more open governments and declining corruption rates. Both have received large U.S. aid packages for democratization projects. Amid this time of far-reaching political change, the issue of police reform became a cornerstone in the fight against corruption for both Tbilisi, Georgia, and Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Georgia and Kyrgyzstan demonstrate that, for the change to take place, both top-down and bottom-up efforts are necessary. A political regime must feel accountable to the broader public to guide reform and destroy the Soviet legacy of a militarized police, while also introducing the public's voice into the discussion of how to proceed with the reform. Georgia and Kyrgyzstan each, however, lacked one of the two components. In Georgia, police reform programs redefined the role of the police in sustaining social order. However, these changes reflected the ideas of the educated elites, not the wider masses. The police-society dialogue is still lacking, and the possibility of future change is uncertain after Georgia elected a new parliament and appointed a new prime minister. In Kyrgyzstan, the same old political elites who came to power as a result of two regime changes in 2005 and in 2010 have been trying to change the Interior Ministry by retraining personnel and amending the legal code. Political leaders were reluctant to introduce any major changes because many of them still had lucrative informal ties with Interior Ministry personnel. After many starts and stops and regime changes in Kyrgyzstan, the pace of reform quickened only after several local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) inserted themselves in the process of designing and overseeing the reform in 2010-13. The future of the reform is still uncertain, but its concept has become a matter of broad public discussion with several activists and NGOs involved in the process.
Download or read book The SAGE Handbook of Global Policing written by Ben Bradford and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The SAGE Handbook of Global Policing examines and critically retraces the field of policing studies by posing and exploring a series of fundamental questions to do with the concept and institutions of policing and their relation to social and political life in today′s globalized world. The volume is structured in the following four parts: Part One: Lenses Part Two: Social and Political Order Part Three: Legacies Part Four: Problems and Problematics. By bringing new lines of vision and new voices to the social analysis of policing, and by clearly demonstrating why policing matters, the Handbook will be an essential tool for anyone in the field.
Download or read book Informal Economies in Post Socialist Spaces written by J. Morris and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-06-23 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Informed by in-depth case studies focusing on a wide spectrum of micro and macro post-socialist realities, this book demonstrates the multi-faceted nature of informality and suggests that it is a widely diffused phenomenon, used at all levels of a society and by both winners and losers of post-socialist transition.
Download or read book The Politics of Police Reform written by Erica Marat and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it take to reform a post-Soviet police force? This book explores the conditions in which a meaningful transformation of the police is likely to succeed and when it will fail. Based on the analysis of five post-Soviet countries that have officially embarked on police reform efforts, Erica Marat examines various pathways to transforming how the state relates to society through policing.
Download or read book The Causes of Post Mobilization Leadership Change and Continuity written by Vasili Rukhadze and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Large, fragmented coalitions disintegrate
Download or read book Russia the Former Soviet Republics and Europe Since 1989 written by Katherine Graney and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, early hopes for the integration of the post-Soviet states into a "Europe whole and free" seem to have been decisively dashed. Europe itself is in the midst of a multifaceted crisis that threatens the considerable gains of the post-war liberal European experiment. In Russia, the Former Soviet Republics, and Europe Since 1989, Katherine Graney provides a panoramic and historically-rooted overview of the process of "Europeanization" in Russia and all fourteen of the former Soviet republics since 1989. Graney argues that deeply rooted ideas about Europe's cultural-civilizational primacy and concerns about both ideological and institutional alignment with Europe continue to influence both internal politics in contemporary Europe and the processes of Europeanization in the post-Soviet world. By comparing the effect of the phenomenon across Russia and the ex-republics, Graney provides a theoretically grounded and empirically rich window into how we should study politics in the former USSR.
Download or read book Georgia Revolution and War written by Rick Fawn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The post-Soviet country of Georgia has generated surprise upon surprise. Its Rose Revolution in 2003 marked the first time an existing leadership of a post-Soviet state was forced to surrender power peacefully. The new leadership of Western-educated Mikheil Saakashvili initiated wide-ranging domestic reforms, including a large-scale, unprecedented anti-corruption drive. It also intensified relations with the West and sought membership of the EU and NATO. The Georgian leadership’s expressed aim of re-integrating territories lost in wars in the early 1990s resulted in a devastating conflict with Russia in 2008. All these developments, and their wider implications, receive careful yet readable attention in this collection by a truly international and specialist group of authors and practitioners. The book offers a spectrum of opinion and compelling insight into the events and decisions that have recently shaped this fascinating yet understudied country, and placed it at the forefront of interest in the changes transforming post-Soviet Eurasia. This book is based on a special issue of European Security.
Download or read book Weak Institutions and the Governance Dilemma written by Mariella Falkenhain and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Weak Institutions and the Governance Dilemma is especially important and welcome since it offers a very incisive analysis of the role of NGOs in transitional democracies and the effect of institutional setting on NGO effectiveness in representing citizen interests. This book offers a very creative conceptual framework and timely, penetrating case studies which provide valuable insights on NGO strategy, governmental capacity, and the possibilities for social change.”Steven Rathgeb Smith, Executive Director, American Political Science Association, and Georgetown University, USA This book provides a novel analytical perspective on policymaking, policy effects and NGOs in hybrid regimes. It examines the sources and patterns of gaps between formal rules, political practice and longer term effects, and explores how NGOs navigate the tension-laden environments that gaps represent. The book shows how weak institutions and malfunctioning policies turn NGOs into ambivalent actors. Empirically, it covers criminal justice and social protection policies in post-Soviet Georgia and Armenia. The findings from the in-depth case studies are then extended by a discussion of gaps in hybrid regimes as diverse as Malaysia, Kenya and Russia. The book’s approach and findings will appeal to scholars, students and practitioners interested in NGOs, institutional theory and public policy.
Download or read book State building written by Verena Fritz and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-10 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the process of state-building in Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia from a political economy and institutional perspective. Weak and distorted state capacity has come to be widely recognized as a key obstacle to successful transformation—including economic modernization and growth as well as the consolidation of democracy. However, so far little systematic research has been carried out on state capacity per se and on how to explain its development. The book provides new insights in considering the evolution of Ukraine since 1992, offering an in-depth view of institutional development in crucial areas and thus tracing the process of state-building. It draws comparisons with developments in Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia (based on field research). To capture the process of state-building empirically, focuses on the extraction and expenditure systems which are a central pillar of state capacity and also a central link between citizens and the state. The book also sheds light on how Ukraine’s potential ‘second transition’ currently under way will have an impact on its institutional system.
Download or read book Freedom in the World 1996 1997 written by Adrian Karatnycky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 747 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom in the World is an institutional effort by Freedom House to monitor the progress and decline of political rights and civil liberties in 192 nations and 17 related and disputed territories. These year-end reviews of freedom began in 1955, when they were called the Balance Sheet of Freedom and,still later, the Annual Survey of the Progress of Freedom. This program was expanded in the early 1970s, and has been issued in a more developed context as a yearbook since 1978. Since 1989, this distinguished Survey project has been a year long effort produced by regional experts, consultants, and human rights specialists. It derives its information from a wide range of authoritative sources. Most valued of these are the many human rights activists, journalists, editors, and political figures who keep the world informed of the human rights situation in their own countries. Throughout the year, Freedom House personnel regularly conduct fact-finding missions to gain in-depth knowledge of the vast political transformations affecting our world,. These investigations make every effort to include meetings with a cross-sectionof political parties and associations, human rights monitors, religious figures, representatives of both the private sector and trade union movement, academics, and journalists. Freedom in the World is now the standard reference work for measuring progress,or the lack there of, in the process of regime democratization and political maturity. Adrian Karatnycky is the president of Freedom House. Aili Piano is a senior researcher at Freedom House. This year's survey team includes: Martin Edwin Andersen, Gordon Bardos, Michael Goldfarb, Charles Graybow, Kristen Guida, Karin Deutsch Karlekar, Edward R. McMahon, Aili Piano, Arch Puddington, Amanda Schnetzer, Cindy Shiner, Leonard R. Sussman, and Kendra Zaharescu.
Download or read book The Russian Military and the Georgia War written by Ariel Cohen and published by Strategic Studies Institute. This book was released on 2011 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this monograph, the authors state that Russia planned the war against Georgia in August 2008 aiming for the annexation of Abkhazia, weakening the Saakashvili regime, and prevention of NATO enlargement. According to them, while Russia won the campaign, it also exposed its own military as badly needing reform. The war also demonstrated weaknesses of the NATO and the European Union security systems.
Download or read book Authoritarian Stability in the South Caucasus written by Matteo Fumagalli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-18 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, competitive authoritarianism has become an increasingly common form of non-democratic politics. What is the relationship between the demand for particular public policies and a regime’s durability in office in such cases? How does policy-making interact with organizational power, the willingness to resort to coercion and patronage politics in countries home to democratic-looking institutions that none the less fall short of democratic standards? In this book we show that such regimes do more than just survive and collapse. Moreover, we argue that far from being passive pawns in the hands of their leaders voters in competitive authoritarian regimes, do matter are taken seriously. We investigate how regimes and voters interact in the cases of Georgia and Armenia, two post-Soviet countries in the South Caucasus, to identify how voters preferences feed into policy-making and gauge the extent to which the regimes’ adjustment of their policies crucially affects regime stability. To these ends, we draw on a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods, including a survey experiment carried out in the two countries. The volume was originally published as a special issue of the journal Caucasus Survey.