How Issue-Specific, Cross-Regional Studies Serve Single-Case Analysis

• In Event: Rethinking Africa, Eurasia & the West: Regions, States & Comparative Area Studies

Abstract

Specific claims about Russian politics, economics, natural resource use, and demographic trends are frequently made on the basis of implied comparisons to Western societies and/or some fixed baseline rooted in original aspirations or the experiences of the 1990s. The result is a highly politicized, often exaggerated confrontation between “black” and “white” views of a country that miss many of the fluid, complex nuances of the Russian Federation. This paper is a modest attempt to correct for some of the sweeping errors that creep in when the only comparative referent used is either an implicit one (e.g., the West) or an obsolete, pre-existing one (e.g. “communist bloc”) that obscures the context within which various trends are unfolding. There is a real opportunity to improving and "complexifying" our understanding of a single country by using different comparative referents for different aspects or issue areas. In the realm of politics, the paper brings in other non-Western politics (including Turkey and India) and their struggles with redefining national identity so as to make better sense of what Putin’s Russia has been up to in seeking to advance its own brand of so-called “sovereign democracy.” A different basket of both post-industrial and emerging economies is used to make sense of how to evaluate the initial spike in Russia’s economy following the 1990s decline and the more recent “flattening” of growth, especially since 2015. Finally, entirely different sets of comparative referents are brought in to reexamine the prevalent narratives concerning both Russia’s “resource curse” and its “demographic crisis” – with the most negative prognostications significantly diluted on the basis of experiences of other leading oil-exporting countries (in the first domain) and of other other (mostly East European) countries facing population decline (in the second domain). These “corrections” reveal the importance of contextualized comparisons featuring the relevant baskets of comparative referents in enhancing our estimations of what is going on in a single country.

Authors

• Rudra Sil, University of Pennsylvania

• Allison D. Evans, University of Nevada, Reno