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 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 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 Police Reform and Human Rights written by Niels A. Uildriks and published by Intersentia nv. This book was released on 2005 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the demise of communism in the early nineties, police reform and human rights have become important topics in post-communist societies striving for more democratic and human rights based forms of governance. In spite of the introduction of new constitutions, the ratification of human rights treaties in many such countries, as well as the introduction of new criminal law and procedure codes, policing realities overall have proved remarkably intransigent. In this volume diverse experts from different countries discuss both impediments to and opportunities for the development of a more democratic and human rights-oriented police. As such, this volume is of importance to students and academics, as well as practitioners interested in acquiring an insight into the viability of different approaches to improve the quality of democratic and human rights-oriented policing in post-communist societies and beyond.
Download or read book Police Reform in Post Soviet Societies written by Adrian Beck and published by . This book was released on 2008-03 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reform of the police is a crucial factor in ensuring that the transformation of post-Soviet societies into civil, democratic societies is complete. Based on extensive original research, this book shows that unfortunately the police forces of the former Soviet bloc countries continue to be highly centralized and politicized, feared and mistrusted by the public, and seen as routinely corrupt and incapable of responding to the needs of a changing society. Police Reform in Post-Soviet Societiesprovides a comprehensive analysis of policing in post-Soviet societies, looking particularly at the obstacles to reform, and discussing the prospects for developing a more democratic policing model.
Download or read book Transforming Police in Central and Eastern Europe written by Marina Caparini and published by Lit Verlag. This book was released on 2004 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The issue of police reform in countries in transition from state socialism toward more democratic forms of governance has risen to practical prominence in recent years. The collapse of the Soviet Union initiated fundamental changes in aspirations, ideologies and governing practices among former members of the socialist camp. Reforming policing systems which had served primarily to protect the party-states from their opponents into systems which serve and protect civic society has come to be seen as an essential prerequisite and concomitant of the democratisation process in transitional countries. The chapters in this book describe what has happened to the policing systems in 14 countries in Central and eastern Europe; what reforms in ideology, organisation, policies and practices have been undertaken; what has changed in the way policing is done; and assessment of whether the policing system has moved closer toward democratic policing. In combining descriptions of reforms and assessments of whether reforms have moved policing systems toward more democratic forms, the book provides a comparative overview of what has been achieved since 1989 and what has been learned so far about how to reform policing systems along democratic lines. Such lessons offer insights for further reform in transitional countries and for Western democracies as well, and we hope will stimulate more theoretical discussions of the nature and dynamics of policing systems, state-society relations, and the role of processes of democratisation of policing systems.
Download or read book Understanding the Modern Russian Police written by Olga B. Semukhina and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2013-05-24 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding the Modern Russian Police represents the culmination of ten years of research and an ongoing partnership between the Volgograd Academy of Russian Internal Affairs Ministry (VA MVD) and the Volgograd branch of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (VAPA). The book provides a timely and comprehen
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 Resisting the State written by Kathryn Stoner-Weiss and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-19 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do new, democratizing states often find it so difficult to actually govern? Why do they so often fail to provide their beleaguered populations with better access to public goods and services? Using original and unusual data, this book uses post-communist Russia as a case in examining what the author calls this broader 'weak state syndrome' in many developing countries. Through interviews with over 800 Russian bureaucrats in 72 of Russia's 89 provinces, and a highly original database on patterns of regional government non-compliance to federal law and policy, the book demonstrates that resistance to Russian central authority not so much ethnically based (as others have argued) as much as generated by the will of powerful and wealthy regional political and economic actors seeking to protect assets they had acquired through Russia's troubled transition out of communism.
Download or read book Policing Soviet Society written by Louise Shelley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-02 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to look in depth at the Soviet militia. A crucial aid to understanding the authoritarianism of the communist system and its legacy for Russia and the successor states.
Download or read book Policing Stalin s Socialism written by David R. Shearer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Policing Stalin's Socialism is one of the first books to emphasize the importance of social order repression by Stalin's Soviet regime in contrast to the traditional emphasis of historians on political repression. Based on extensive examination of new archival materials, David Shearer finds that most repression during the Stalinist dictatorship of the 1930s was against marginal social groups such as petty criminals, deviant youth, sectarians, and the unemployed and unproductive. It was because Soviet leaders regarded social disorder as more of a danger to the state than political opposition that they instituted a new form of class war to defend themselves against this perceived threat. Despite the combined work of the political and civil police the efforts to cleanse society failed; this failure set the stage for the massive purges that decimated the country in the late 1930s.
Download or read book Comrade Criminal written by Stephen Handelman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Om den russiske mafia, som ikke kun er bander og organiseret krig, men også et voldeligt udtryk for den revolutionære klassekamp
Download or read book Meandering in Transition written by Ostap Kushnir and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection addresses the dynamics of the post-Communist transition in Central Eastern Europe. Its contributors present a detailed analysis of the events unfolding during the last three decades in the region, focusing in particular on identity-building processes and reforms in Belarus, Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine. The contributors outline reasons why some of these states accomplished a decisive break with the Communist past and became members of European and transatlantic structures, while some opted for pseudo-transition and fostered hybrid political regimes, jeopardizing their genuine integration with the West. A group of states which decided to preserve their Communist legacy is also explained. The collection describes and scrutinizes the formation of geopolitical affiliations and the evolution of discourses of belonging. It also traces the fluctuating dynamics of national decision-making and institution-building, as many of the post-Communist states reconsider and re-elaborate their initial ideas and visions of Europe today. Finally, the collection brings to light the rapidly changing perceptions of the region by the major global actors—the European Union, People’s Republic of China, Russian Federation, and others.
Download or read book Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe written by Mark Beissinger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-07 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes stock of arguments about the historical legacies of communism that have become common within the study of Russia and East Europe more than two decades after communism's demise and elaborates an empirical approach to the study of historical legacies revolving around relationships and mechanisms rather than correlation and outward similarities. Eleven essays by a distinguished group of scholars assess whether post-communist developments in specific areas continue to be shaped by the experience of communism or, alternatively, by fundamental divergences produced before or after communism. Chapters deal with the variable impact of the communist experience on post-communist societies in such areas as regime trajectories and democratic political values; patterns of regional and sectoral economic development; property ownership within the energy sector; the functioning of the executive branch of government, the police, and courts; the relationship of religion to the state; government language policies; and informal relationships and practices.
Download or read book Stalin s Police written by Paul Hagenloh and published by . This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin’s Police offers a new interpretation of the mass repressions associated with the Stalinist terror of the late 1930s. This pioneering study traces the development of professional policing from its pre-revolutionary origins through the late 1930s and early 1940s. Paul Hagenloh argues that the policing methods employed in the late 1930s were the culmination of a set of ideologically driven policies dating back to the previous decade. Hagenloh’s vivid and monumental account is the first to show how Stalin’s peculiar brand of policing—in which criminals, juvenile delinquents, and other marginalized population groups were seen increasingly as threats to the political and social order—supplied the core mechanism of the Great Terror.
Download or read book Fighting Corruption in Public Services written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book chronicles the anti-corruption reforms in public services in Georgia since the Rose Revolution in late 2003. Through a series of case studies, the book draws out the how of these reforms and distills the key success factors.