Suchergebnisse

The research explores the mechanisms in the formation and consolidation of a new regime which combines democratic and authoritarian features; it has emerged as result of democratization processes affecting different world areas in recent years. The study analyses a case of great international significance, post-communist Russia: here internal factors strongly prevail in front of the external variables of democratic imitation and contagion, thus showing to what extent Russia differs from other political contexts. The study intends to examine the strategies used by this regime to solve internal conflicts and become stable in spite of the democratizing pressures coming from outside. Indeed, the literature about political transformations has shown the problems in analyzing these polities together with the need to examine their peculiarities more in depth. In this perspective, the first section focuses on the dynamics of State-building in Russia as a fundamental process in tracing the specific characteristics of the current regime: particularly, it is suggested that the State dimension comes out as crucial in determining the level of political and social pluralism accepted in post-Soviet Russia. This argument is worked out in the second section, which analyses the main mechanisms used by the incumbents to limit and control pluralism within the two arenas of political competition and civil society, from where the major threats to the status quo are supposed to come. The main hypothesis is that the leadership interventions in these spheres during the last ten years have shaped a regime which can be characterized as a new type of authoritarianism: with respect to traditional authoritarian forms a certain degree of political contestation is accepted, visible in the presence of a multiparty system, semi-competitive elections and of the several representatives of civil society. Yet, this diversity is curbed basically in two different ways: from one hand the incumbents provide support to political and social actors who sponsor government politics (see the party of power and pro-Kremlin movements). From the other they use some non coercive forms of control and restriction (in legislation, in political elections) against those actors who promote values and priorities opposed to the official ones.

L'11 marzo 2020, quasi due mesi e mezzo dopo la manifestazione di alcune "polmoniti anomale" in Cina, l'OMS (Organizzazione mondiale della sanità) dichiara che il Covid-19, la malattia causata dal nuovo coronavirus Sars-CoV-2, "può essere caratterizzato come una situazione pandemica". Nel giro di tre mesi la migrazione internazionale del Sars-Cov-2, generatasi dal focolaio di Wuhan in Cina, ha trasformato radicalmente non solo la condizione sanitaria ma gli assetti politici sociali ed economici del mondo intero. Come è stato possibile? E quali sono gli scenari conseguenti che si prospettano? In questo contributo, senza togliere alcuna rilevanza alle questioni inerenti la salute pubblica a livello globale, su cui torneremo, vorremmo parlare del Sars-Cov-2 quale epifenomeno del capitalismo nella sua fase neoliberista[1] e quale funzione "specchio"[2] degli assetti capitalistici della cosiddetta "globalizzazione" neoliberista ed insieme di "detonazione"[3] delle dinamiche e contraddizioni del capitale a livello globale. ; On March 11, 2020, almost two and a half months after the manifestation of some "abnormal pneumonia" in China, the WHO (World Health Organization) declares that Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus Sars-CoV-2 , "Can be characterized as a pandemic situation". Within three months, the international migration of Sars-Cov-2, generated by the Wuhan outbreak in China, has radically transformed not only the health condition but also the social and economic political structures of the whole world. How was this possible? And what are the consequent scenarios that lie ahead? In this contribution, without taking away any relevance to global public health issues, to which we will return, we would like to talk about Sars-Cov-2 as an epiphenomenon of capitalism in its neoliberal phase [1] and as a "mirror" function [2] of the capitalist structures of the so-called neoliberal "globalization" and the "detonation" [3] of the dynamics and contradictions of capital on a global level.