The CNIS released its new publication.



The CNIS new book was launched on 24 September 2013 in Baku. The book “ The Soviet Legacies 22 Years On: Reversed or Reinforced?” is a  collection of articles of  scholars and experts from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Russia and Kazakhstan, based on the series of “ADR Round Tables” – international conferences devoted to the 95th anniversary of the first Azerbaijan Democratic Republic ( 1918-1920) and supported by the National Endowment for Democracy. The publication is edited by the director of the CNIS Leila Alieva and  published by Qanun in three languages – Azerbaijan, Russian, English. It covers three major problems of the transition – unresolved conflict, political parties and elections in the oil rich states and merger of political and economic power in post soviet states.

The first part  “Liberalism and Conflict Resolution”, in contrast with widely spread geopolitical approach to the regional conflicts, suggests analysis based on the domestic factors, primarily, the influence of social transformation on the state of conflicts. The manipulation and consolidation of the Soviet social legacies by  leaders in power, which contributed to the closeness of the people’s minds and thus to prolongation of conflicts is particularly stressed in the article by Leila Alieva “ Opening post-soviet minds: liberalism and conflict resolution”. The papers authored by well known scholars such as Ghia Nodia from Georgia, Rahman Badalov and Ali Abasov  from Azerbaijan, Nikolai Rozov from Russia  explore how much lack of liberalism in the post-Soviet states affected the dynamics and nature of conflicts and capacity of societies to resolve them.

The second part is devoted to the political parties and elections in the oil rich states. The post-Soviet Caspian states face double obstacles on their way to democracy – one  caused by the common Soviet legacies, while the other – by the political economy of natural resources. The result of the combination of two leads to the construction of the system based on patronage, fed by oil revenues,  which replaces the free political competition and leads to distortion of the social preferences through falsified elections.  The authors from the Caspian littoral states – Kazakhstan – Igor Kovtunovskii, Russia- Igor Mintusov and Azerbaijan- Anar Mammedli and Leila Alieva through comparative analysis of these political institutions in their countries demonstrated their greater commonalities with each other,  rather than with their neighbors in the South Caucasus.

The phenomenon of merger of political and economic power has both historically universal and specifically Soviet roots, as it was shown in the piece by Dr. Charles Fairbanks, which disproves cultural deterministic interpretation of bureaucratic corruption.  In turn, Ramazan Gozen from Turkey and Togrul Juvarli from Azerbaijan show how the interrelations between politics and economics depending on state economic model, on the one hand and the nature of elites – on the other, influence greater or lesser degree of merger of political and economic power, leading to corruption and consequently to the weakening of state.

The book  was appraised and critically assessed by external reviewers – Hikmet Hajizade, Elkhan Mehdiyev and Jeyhun Valiyev, which led to lively and creative discussions. All stressed importance of the continuation of the topics and the project, stressing critical importance of in depth analysis of the obstacles on the way to building  of democratic states.


September 25, 2013