Oxana Shevel
I specialize in comparative politics of the post-Communist region, in particular Ukraine and Russia. Thematically, my research has focused on nation- and state-building, the politics of citizenship and migration, memory politics, and church-state relations.
Address: Tufts University
Department of Political Science
Packard Hall
4 The Green
Medford, MA, 02155
USA
Address: Tufts University
Department of Political Science
Packard Hall
4 The Green
Medford, MA, 02155
USA
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Books by Oxana Shevel
Articles by Oxana Shevel
is constituted, perceived implications of citizenship rules for political and economic power of different groups, and external actors, including other states in the region and international organizations, inform the content of citizenship regimes in new states. The chapter will highlight challenges, issues, and dynamics characteristic of new transition states more broadly, though most of the empirical illustration will come from the context of the fifteen successor states of the former Soviet Union. It
contends that the politics of citizenship policymaking (meaning, a set of issues that impact the formation of citizenship rules, and groups whose status is at the center of domestic debates over citizenship rules) differ in the new states in important and systematic ways from the politics of citizenship policymaking in established ‘older’ states. Three particularly important differences will be highlighted and analyzed in the three sub- sections of this chapter.
The book is built on three premises. The first is that political actors always strive to come to terms with the history of their communities in order to generate a sense of order in their personal and collective lives. Second, new leaders sometimes find it advantageous to mete out justice on the politicians of abolished regimes, and whether and how they do so depends heavily on their interpretation and assessment of the collective past. Finally, remembering the past, particularly collectively, is always a political process, thus the politics of memory and commemoration needs to be studied as an integral part of the establishment of new collective identities and new principles of political legitimacy. Each chapter takes a detailed look at the commemorative ceremony of a different country of the former Soviet Bloc. Collectively the book looks at patterns of extrication from state socialism, patterns of ethnic and class conflict, the strategies of communist successor parties, and the cultural traditions of a given country that influence the way official collective memory is constructed.
Twenty Years After Communism develops a new analytical and explanatory framework that helps readers to understand the utility of historical memory as an important and understudied part of democratization.