Full Description
What role does law play in post-communist societies? This book examines the law as a social institution in Eurasia, exploring how it is shaped in everyday interactions between state and society, organisations and individuals, and between law enforcement and other government entities. It bridges the gap between theoretically rich work on law-in-action and the empirical reality of Eurasia.
The contributions in this volume include research on policing, the legal profession, public attitudes towards law, regime support and oppositional mobilisation, crime policy, and property rights, among others. The studies shift away from the common perception that, in Eurasia, the law exists only as a tool for the state to enforce order and suppress dissent. Instead, they show, through empirical analyses, that citizens evade, use, reinterpret and shape the law even in authoritarian contexts—sometimes containing state violence and challenging the regime, and other times reinforcing state capture from below.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Europe-Asia Studies.
Contents
Introduction - Justice, Crime and Citizenship in Eurasia: A Socio-legal Perspective, 1. Who Reports Crime? Citizen Engagement with the Police in Russia and Georgia, 2. Popular Legal Attitudes and the Political Order: Comparative Evidence from Georgia, Russia and Ukraine, 3. Transcending Illegality in Kyrgyzstan: The Case of a Squatter Settlement in Bishkek, 4. Negotiating the Right to Information: Citizen-Government Interactions in the Implementation of the Regulations on Open Government Information in China, 5. Between Human Rights and Transitional Justice: The Dilemma of Constitutional Courts in Post-Communist Central Europe, 6. Becoming a Judge in Russia: An Analysis of Judicial Biographies, 7. Building Socialist Legality: Political Order and Institutional Development in the Soviet and Chinese Procuracies, 8. The Limits of Authoritarian Modernisation: Zero Tolerance Policing in Kazakhstan, 9. Propaganda and the Police: The Softer Side of State Control in China, 10. 'Vigilante Shows' and Law Enforcement in Russia, 11. Technological Solutions for Complex Problems: Emerging Electronic Surveillance Regimes in Eurasian Cities
