Imagined Economies The Sources of Russian Regionalism

This book analyses the economics of regional sovereignty movements in the Russian Federation from 1990???1993.

This book examines the economic bases of regional sovereignty movements in the Russian Federation from 1990–1993. The analysis is based on an original data set of Russian regional sovereignty movements and the author employs a variety of methods including quantitative statistical analysis, as well as qualitative case studies of Sverdlovsk and Samara oblasts using systematic content analysis of local newspaper articles. The central finding of the book is that variation in Russian regional activism is explained not by differences in economic conditions but by differences in the construction or imagination of economic interests; to put it in the language of other contemporary debates, economic advantage and disadvantage are as imagined as nations. In arguing that regional economic interests are inter-subjective, contingent, and institutionally specific, the book addresses a major question in political economy, namely the origin of economic interests. In addition, by engaging the nationalism literature, the book expands the constructivist paradigm to the development of economic interests.

List of tables; List of figures and maps; List of acronyms; Note on transliteration; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Regionalism in the Russian Federation: theories and evidence; 2. Imagined economies: constructivist political economy and nationalism; 3. Breaking the Soviet doxa: perestroika, rasstroika, and the evolution of regionalism; 4. To each his own: the development of heterogeneous regional understandings and interests in Russia; 5. Imagined economies in Samara and Sverdlovsk: differences in regional understandings of the economy; 6. Regional understandings of the economy and sovereignty: the economic basis of the movement for a Urals Republic; 7. Regional understandings, institutional context, and the development of the movement for a Urals Republic; Conclusion; Appendix tables; Index.

This book analyses the economic bases of regional sovereignty movements in the Russian Federation from 1990-1993. It addresses the literature on both nationalism and political economy and provides a novel analytic framework for explaining the origin of economic interests and the development of sovereignty movements.

Yoshiko M. Herrera received her B.A. from Dartmouth College (1992), and M.A. (1994) and Ph.D. (1999) from the University of Chicago. From 1999–2007 she taught at Harvard University, as an Assistant Professor and then as John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Government. Since 2007 she has been Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research interests include identity and ethnic politics, political economy, bureaucratic reform, qualitative methods, public health, and the states of the Former Soviet Union.