Showing 1 - 8 of 8 Items

Date: 2017-11-16

Creator: Lisa Mc Intosh Sundstrom, Laura A. Henry

Access: Open access

Under what conditions do private forest governance standards influence state policy and behavior to become more oriented toward sustainability? We argue that governance schemes targeting firms may indirectly shape state behavior, even when designed to bypass state regulation. Through an examination of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) in Russia and Brazil, we find that the FSC has influenced domestic rhetoric, laws, and enforcement practices. FSC has had a more disruptive and consequential impact on Russia's domestic forest governance; in Brazil, earlier transnational environmental campaigns had already begun to shift domestic institutions toward sustainability. Based on interview data and textual analysis of FSC and government documents, we identify the mechanisms of indirect FSC influence on states-professionalization, civil society mobilization, firm lobbying, and international market pressure, and argue that they are likely to be activated under conditions of poor and decentralized governance, overlapping and competing regulations and high foreign market demand for exports.

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Laura H.C. Howells

Access: Open access

Digital authoritarianism is on the rise around the world and threatens the data privacy and rights of both domestic and international Internet users. However, scholarship on digital authoritarianism remains limited in scope and case study selection. This study contributes a new, more comprehensive analytical framework for the study of Internet governance and applies it to the case studies of China and Russia. Special attention is paid to the still understudied Russian Internet governance model. After thorough literature review and novel data collection and analysis, this paper identifies relative centralization of network infrastructure and the extent and pace of change in governance as the most notable differences between the two models. These points of divergence may be explained by two theories; the varieties of authoritarianism hypothesis posits that different political systems face persistent and unique constraints to governance of the digital realm. The development trajectory theory argues that each country’s technological development path foreshadows the systems’ capacity for and extent of governance. This study is among the first to distinguish between Internet governance strategies of authoritarian regimes.

Date: 2018-05-04

Creator: Maria Tysiachniouk, Laura A. Henry, Machiel Lamers, Jan P.M. van Tatenhove

Access: Open access

How can indigenous communities in illiberal regimes benefit from oil production? This paper compares the experience of two indigenous peoples in the Russian Arctic, the Nenets and the Komi-Izhemtsi, in their quest for environmental protection and the development of benefit-sharing arrangements with Lukoil, a Russian oil company. The Nenets people, recognized by the Russian state as indigenous, are marginalized political actors who identified a route to receiving compensation for loss of land and damage to the environment as well as economic benefits under the auspices of Russian law and Lukoil’s corporate policies. In contrast, the Komi-Izhemtsi, despite indigenous status in global institutions including the United Nations and the Arctic Council, are unrecognized as indigenous domestically and initially received no compensation. Their path to benefit sharing was more challenging as they partnered with local nongovernmental organizations and global environmentalists to pressure Lukoil to sign a benefit-sharing agreement. Ultimately, the comparison illustrates how transnational partnerships can empower indigenous people to gain benefits from natural resource exploitation even in illiberal political systems.

Date: 2021-12-01

Creator: Laura Howells, Laura A. Henry

Access: Open access

Digital authoritarianism threatens the privacy and rights of Internet users worldwide, yet scholarship on this topic remains limited in analytical power and case selection. In this article, we introduce a comprehensive analytical framework to the field of Internet governance and apply it first, briefly, to the well-known case of China and then, in more depth, to the still-understudied Russian case. We identify the extent and relative centralization of Internet governance as well as proactive versus reactive approaches to governance as notable differences between the cases, highlighting variation among digital authoritarians’ governance strategies. We conclude that Russia’s Internet governance model is less comprehensive and consistent than China’s, but its components may be more easily exported to other political systems. We then consider whether recent changes to Russia’s Internet governance suggest that it could converge with the Chinese model over time.

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Olivia Giles

Access: Open access

This honors thesis analyzes human rights campaigns to end the practice of state-sponsored torture in Syria during the presidency of Bashar al-Assad. It compares the 2000 Damascus Spring and the 2011 Arab Spring using the concept of the “contentious spiral model.” The model is based on the elements of the original “spiral model” introduced in The Power of Human Rights (1999) and the factors of contentious politics discussed in Dynamics of Contention (2001). It suggests that human rights movements that emerge from uprisings need effective mobilization by domestic and international actors. Sustained pressure from both sources should gradually force the state to make concessions until there is an absence of human rights violations. The study uses research on social movements and international politics in Syria, in addition to data on the practice of torture, to suggest that human rights campaigns to end state-sponsored torture in Syria have been unsuccessful because of the interference of Assad’s foreign alliances. These countries have helped the regime backlash against the opposition during uprisings, which has led to the fracturing of the movement. During the Damascus Spring, this interference took the form of shifting the world’s focus to other regional issues, and during the Arab Spring, Syria’s allies directly supported the Assad regime militarily, financially, and legally.

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Katherine Davidson

Access: Open access

Russia’s 2016 disinformation campaign during the U.S. elections represented the first large-scale campaign against the United States and was intended to cause American citizens to question the fundamental security and resilience of U.S. democracy. A similar campaign during the 2016 U.K. Brexit referendum supported the campaign to leave the European Union. This paper assesses the policy formation process in the United States and United Kingdom in response to 2016 Russian disinformation using a bureaucratic politics framework. Focusing on the role of sub-state organizations in policy formation, the paper identifies challenges to establishing an effective policy response to foreign disinformation, particularly in the emergence of leadership and bargaining, and the impact of centralization of power in the U.K. Discussion of the shift in foreign policy context since the end of the Cold War, which provided a greater level of foreign policy consensus, as well as specific challenges presented by the cyber deterrence context, supplements insights from bureaucratic politics. Despite different governmental structures, both countries struggled to achieve collaborative and systematic policy processes; analysis reveals the lack of leadership and coordination in the United States and both the lack of compromise and effective fulfillment of responsibilities in the United Kingdom. Particular challenges of democracies responding to exercises of sharp power by authoritarian governments point to the need for a wholistic response from public and private entities and better definition of intelligence agencies’ responsibility to election security in the U.K.

Date: 2019-12-01

Creator: Svetlana A. Tulaeva, Maria S. Tysiachniouk, Laura A. Henry, Leah S. Horowitz

Access: Open access

The governance of extractive industries has become increasingly globalized. International conventions and multi-stakeholder institutions set out rules and standards on a range of issues, such as environmental protection, human rights, and Indigenous rights. Companies' compliance with these global rules may minimize risks for investors and shareholders, while offering people at sites of extraction more leverage. Although the Russian state retains a significant stake in the oil and gas industries, Russian oil and gas companies have globalized as well, receiving foreign investment, participating in global supply chains, and signing on to global agreements. We investigate how this global engagement has affected Nenets Indigenous communities in Yamal, an oil-and gas-rich region in the Russian Arctic, by analyzing Indigenous protests and benefit-sharing arrangements. Contrary to expectations, we find that Nenets Indigenous communities have not been empowered by international governance measures, and also struggle to use domestic laws to resolve problems. In Russia, the state continues to play a significant role in determining outcomes for Indigenous communities, in part by working with Indigenous associations that are state allies. We conclude that governance generating networks in the region are under-developed.

Date: 2012-09-01

Creator: Laura A. Henry

Access: Open access

Prior to December 2011, instances of widespread collective mobilization were relatively rare in contemporary Russia. Russian citizens are more likely to engage in a different means of airing grievances: making an official complaint to the authorities. This article considers how complaint-making, as a variety of political participation, may contribute either to authoritarian resilience or to political liberalization. The political significance of complaints made to the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Russian Federation is examined. Since it is the broader political context that shapes the significance of complaints, in the absence of meaningful elections individualized appeals to the state are unlikely to promote democratic change, although they may allow for redress of individual rights violations. © 2012 The Regents of the University of California.