Eastern European politics is largely seen as erratic, unstructured, and in flux. If any patterning can be found, most works expect it to be largely shaped by the experience of communism. This work argues that eastern European politics, despite their specific post-communist characteristics, follow a number of long-standing sociological and political regularities. They are in fact significantly shaped by state-building, ethnicity, and religion — all classical Lipset-Rokkanian divides well known to scholars of established democracies.

Within the context of modernity and globalisation, this research project investigates the processes by which governance arises in territories subjected to illicit forms of social order that contest state sovereignty and authority. Drawing from recursive theoretical and empirical research rooted in the ‘abductive’ method of Pragmatism, the analysis has three principal objectives: First, it offers a different conceptual approach by moving away from negative categorisation of the phenomena, e.g.

Allison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics and founding director of the Rohatyn Center for International Affairs at Middlebury College. She is the author of 'One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy' and the forthcoming 'Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Leaks: The Story of Whistleblowing in America', both with Yale University Press. She is working on a new book tentatively titled 'Consumers vs. Citizens: How the Internet Revolution is Remaking Global Security and Democracy’s Public Square'.

Talks by Oliver Daddow, University of Nottingham and Christopher Gifford, University of Huddersfield